“Jerry Brudos,” said Robin. Brudos had been mentioned in The Demon of Paradise Park. Like Creed, Brudos had been wearing women’s clothing when he abducted one of his victims.
“I need to get a bloody social life going again,” said Max, more expansive than Robin had ever known him under the influence of alcohol and good news. “I’ve been feeling like hell ever since Matthew left. Kept wondering whether I shouldn’t just sell this place and move on.”
Robin thought her slight feeling of panic might have shown in her face, because Max said,
“Don’t worry, I’m not going to. But it’s half-killed me, keeping it going. I really only bought the place because of him. ‘Put it all into property, you can’t lose with property,’ he said.”
He looked as though he was going to say something else, but if so, decided against it.
“Max, I wanted to ask you something,” said Robin, “but it’s totally fine if the answer’s no. My younger brother and a girlfriend are looking for a place to stay in London for the weekend of the fourteenth and fifteenth of February. But if you don’t—”
“Don’t be silly,” said Max. “They can sleep on this,” he said, patting the sofa. “It folds out.”
“Oh,” said Robin, who hadn’t known this. “Well, great. Thanks, Max.”
The champagne and the hot bath had made Robin feel incredibly sleepy, but they talked on for a while about Max’s new drama, until at last Robin apologized and said she really did need to go to bed.
As she pulled the duvet over herself, Robin decided against starting a new chapter on Creed. It was best not to have certain things in your head if you wanted to get to sleep. However, once she’d turned out her bedside lamp she found her mind refusing to shut down, so she reached for her iPod.
She never listened to music on headphones unless she knew Max was in the flat. Some life experiences made a person forever conscious of their ability to react, to have advance warning. Now, though, with the front door safely double-locked (Robin had checked, as she always did), and with her flatmate and a dog mere seconds away, she inserted her earbuds and pressed shuffle on the four albums of Joni Mitchell’s she’d now bought, choosing music over another bottle of perfume she didn’t like.
Sometimes, when listening to Mitchell, which Robin was doing frequently these days, she could imagine Margot Bamborough smiling at her through the music. Margot was forever frozen at twenty-nine, fighting not to be defeated by a life more complicated than she had ever imagined it would be, when she conceived the ambition of raising herself out of poverty by brains and hard work.
An unfamiliar song began to play. The words told the story of the end of a love affair. It was a simpler, more direct lyric than many of Mitchell’s, with little metaphor or poetry about it. Last chance lost/The hero cannot make the change/Last chance lost/The shrew will not be tamed.
Robin thought of Matthew, unable to adapt himself to a wife who wanted more from life than a steady progression up the property ladder, unable to give up the mistress who had always, in truth, been better suited to his ideals and ambitions than Robin. So did that make Robin the shrew, fighting for a career that everyone but she thought was a mistake?
Lying in the dark, listening to Mitchell’s voice, which was deeper and huskier on her later albums, an idea that had been hovering on the periphery of Robin’s thoughts for a couple of weeks forced its way into the forefront of her mind. It had been lurking ever since she’d read the letter from the Ministry of Justice, refusing Strike permission to see the serial killer.
Strike had accepted the Ministry of Justice’s decision, and indeed, so had Robin, who had no desire to increase the suffering of the victims’ families. And yet the man who might save Anna from a lifetime of continued pain and uncertainty was still alive. If Irene Hickson had been bursting to talk to Strike, how much more willing might Creed be, after decades of silence?
Last chance lost/the hero cannot make the change.
Robin sat up abruptly, pulled out her earphones, turned the lamp back on, sat up and reached for the notebook and pen she always kept beside her bed these days.
There was no need to tell Strike what she was up to. The possibility that her actions might backfire on the agency must be taken. If she didn’t try, she’d forever wonder whether there hadn’t been a chance of reaching Creed, after all.
34
… no Art, nor any Leach’s Might…
Can remedy such hurts; such hurts are hellish Pain.
Edmund Spenser
The Faerie Queene
The train service between Cornwall and London resumed at last. Strike packed his bags, but promised his aunt and uncle he’d be back soon. Joan clung to him in silence at parting. Incredibly, Strike would have preferred one of the emotional-blackmail-laden farewells that had previously antagonized him.
Riding the train back to London, Strike found his mood mirrored in the monochrome winter landscape of mud and shivering trees he was watching through the dirt-streaked window. Joan’s slow decline was a different experience to the deaths with which Strike was familiar, which had almost all been of the unnatural kind. As a soldier and an investigator, he’d become inured to the need to assimilate, without warning, the sudden, brutal extinction of a human being, to accept the sudden vacuum where once a soul had flickered. Joan’s slow capitulation to an enemy inside her own body was something new to him. A small part of Strike, of which he was ashamed, wanted everything to be over, and for the mourning to begin in earnest, and, as the train bore him east, he looked forward to the temporary sanctuary of his empty flat, where he was free to feel miserable without either the need to parade his sadness for the neighbors, or to sport a veneer of fake cheerfulness for his aunt.
He turned down two invitations for dinner on Saturday night, one from Lucy, one from Nick and Ilsa, preferring to deal with the agency’s books and review case files submitted by Barclay, Hutchins and Morris. On Sunday he spoke again to Dr. Gupta and to a couple of relatives of deceased witnesses in the Bamborough case, preparatory to a catch-up with Robin the following day.
But on Sunday evening, while standing beside the spaghetti boiling on his single hob, he received a second text from his unknown half-sister, Prudence.
Hi Cormoran, I don’t know whether you received my first text. Hopefully this one will reach you. I just wanted to say (I think) I understand your reasons for not wanting to join us for Dad’s group photo, or for the party. There’s a little more behind the party than a new album. I’d be happy to talk to you about that in person, but as a family we’re keeping it confidential. I hope you won’t mind me adding that, like you, I’m the result of one of Dad’s briefer liaisons (!) and I’ve had to deal with my own share of hurt and anger over the years. I wonder whether you’d like to have a coffee to discuss this further? I’m in Putney. Please do get in touch. It would be great to meet. Warmest wishes, Pru
His spaghetti now boiling noisily, Strike lit a cigarette. Pressure seemed to be building behind his eyeballs. He knew he was smoking too much: his tongue ached, and ever since his Christmas flu, his morning cough had been worse than ever. Barclay had been extolling the virtues of vaping the last time they’d met. Perhaps it was time to try that, or at least to cut down on the cigarettes.
He read Prudence’s text a second time. What confidential reason could be behind the party, other than his father’s new album? Had Rokeby finally been given his knighthood, or was he making a fuss over the Deadbeats’ fiftieth anniversary in an attempt to remind those who gave out honors that he hadn’t yet had one? Strike tried to imagine Lucy’s reaction, if he told her he was off to meet a host of new half-siblings, when her small stock of relatives was about to be diminished by one. He tried to picture this Prudence, of whom he knew nothing at all, except that her mother had been a well-known actress.
Turning off the hob, he left the spaghetti floating in its water, and began to text a response, cigarette between his teeth.
Thanks for the texts. I’ve got no objection to meeting you, but now’s not a good time. Appreciate that you’re doing what you think is the right thing but I’ve never been much for faking feelings or maintaining polite fictions to suit public celebrations. I don’t have a relationship with—
Strike paused for a full minute. He never referred to Jonny Rokeby as “Dad” and he didn’t want to say “our father,” because that seemed to bracket himself and Prudence together in a way that felt uncomfortable, as she was a total stranger.
And yet some part of him didn’t feel she was a stranger. Some part of him felt a tug toward her. What was it? Simple curiosity? An echo of the longing he’d felt as a child, for a father who never turned up? Or was it something more primitive: the calling of blood to blood, an animal sense of connection that couldn’t quite be eradicated, no matter how much you tried to sever the tie?