52
Do not envy the man with the x-ray eyes.
Strike, who had been standing in the shadow of a warehouse in Bow, keeping watch on Blondin Street, heard Robin’s sudden gasp, the thud of the mobile on the pavement and then the scuffling and skidding of feet on asphalt.
He began to run. The phone connection to Robin was still open, but he could hear nothing. Panic sharpened his mental processes and obliterated all perception of pain as he sprinted down a darkening street in the direction of the nearest station. He needed a second phone.
“Need to borrow that, mate!” he bellowed at a pair of skinny black youths walking towards him, one of whom was chuckling into a mobile. “Crime’s being committed, need to borrow that phone!”
Strike’s size and his aura of authority as he pelted towards them made the teenager surrender the phone with a look of fear and bewilderment.
“Come with me!” Strike bellowed at the two boys, running on past them towards busier streets where he might be able to find a cab, his own mobile still pressed to his other ear. “Police!” Strike yelled into the boy’s phone as the stunned teenagers ran alongside him like bodyguards. “There’s a woman being attacked near Catford Bridge station, I was on the line to her when it happened! It’s happening right — no, I don’t know the street but it’s one or two away from the station — right now, I was on the line to her when he grabbed her, I heard it happen — yeah — and fucking hurry!
“Cheers, mate,” Strike panted, throwing the mobile back into the hands of its owner, who continued to run alongside him for several yards without realizing that he no longer needed to.
Strike hurtled around a corner; Bow was a totally unfamiliar area of London to him. On he ran past the Bow Bells pub, ignoring the red-hot jabs of the ligaments in his knee, moving awkwardly with only one free arm to balance himself, his silent phone still clamped to his ear. Then he heard a rape alarm going off at the other end of the line.
“TAXI!” he bellowed at a distant glowing light. “ROBIN!” he yelled into the phone, sure she could not hear him over the screeching alarm. “ROBIN, I’VE CALLED THE POLICE! THE POLICE ARE ON THEIR WAY. ARE YOU LISTENING, YOU FUCKER?”
The taxi had driven off without him. Drinkers outside the Bow Bells stared at the lunatic hobbling past at high speed, yelling and swearing into his phone. A second taxi appeared.
“TAXI! TAXI!” Strike bellowed and it turned, heading towards him, just as Robin’s voice spoke in his ear, gasping.
“Are... you there?”
“JESUS CHRIST! WHAT’S HAPPENED?”
“Stop... shouting...”
With enormous difficulty he modulated his volume.
“What’s happened?”
“I can’t see,” she said. “I can’t... see anything...”
Strike wrenched open the back door of the cab and threw himself inside.
“Catford Bridge station, hurry! What d’you mean, you can’t—? What’s he done to you? NOT YOU!” he bellowed at the confused cabbie. “Go! Go!”
“No... it’s your bloody... rape alarm... stuff... in my face... oh... shit...”
The taxi was speeding along, but Strike had to physically restrain himself from urging the driver to floor it.
“What happened? Are you hurt?”
“A — a bit... there are people here...”
He could hear them now, people surrounding her, murmuring, talking excitedly amongst themselves.
“... hospital...” he heard Robin say, away from the phone.
“Robin? ROBIN?”
“Stop shouting!” she said. “Listen, they’ve called an ambulance, I’m going to—”
“WHAT’S HE DONE TO YOU?”
“Cut me... up my arm... I think it’ll need stitching... God, it stings...”
“Which hospital? Let me speak to someone! I’ll meet you there!”
Strike arrived at the Accident and Emergency Department at University Hospital Lewisham twenty-five minutes later, limping heavily and wearing such an anguished expression that a kindly nurse reassured him that a doctor would be with him shortly.
“No,” he said, waving her away as he clumped towards the reception desk, “I’m here with someone — Robin Ellacott, she’s been knifed—”
His eyes traveled frantically over the packed waiting room where a young boy was whimpering on his mother’s lap and a groaning drunk cradled his bloodied head in his hands. A male nurse was showing a breathless old lady how to use an inhaler.
“Strike... yes... Miss Ellacott said you’d be coming,” said the receptionist, who had checked her computer records with what Strike felt was unnecessary and provocative deliberation. “Down the corridor and to the right... first cubicle.”
He slipped a little on the shining floor in his haste, swore and hurried on. Several people’s eyes followed his large, ungainly figure, wondering whether he was quite right in the head.
“Robin? Fucking hell!”
Scarlet spatters disfigured her face; both eyes were swollen. A young male doctor, who was examining an eight-inch wound in her forearm, barked:
“Out until I’ve finished!”
“It isn’t blood!” Robin called as Strike retreated behind the curtain. “It’s the damn spray stuff in your rape alarm!”
“Stay still, please,” Strike heard the doctor say.
He paced a little outside the cubicle. Five other curtained beds hid their secrets along the side ward. The nurses’ rubber soles squeaked on the highly polished gray floor. God, how he hated hospitals: the smell of them, the institutional cleanliness underlaid with that faint whiff of human decomposition, immediately transported him back to those long months in Selly Oak after his leg had been blown off.
What had he done? What had he done? He had let her work, knowing the bastard had her in his sights. She could have died. She should have died. Nurses rustled past in their blue scrubs. Behind the curtain, Robin gave a small gasp of pain and Strike ground his teeth.
“Well, she’s been extremely lucky,” said the doctor, ripping the curtains open ten minutes later. “He could have severed the brachial artery. There’s tendon damage, though, and we won’t know how much until we get her into theater.”
He clearly thought they were a couple. Strike did not put him right.
“She needs surgery?”
“To repair the tendon damage,” said the doctor, as though Strike were a bit slow. “Plus, that wound needs a proper clean. I want to X-ray her ribs as well.”
He left. Bracing himself, Strike entered the cubicle.
“I know I screwed up,” said Robin.
“Holy shit, did you think I was going to tell you off?”
“Maybe,” she said, pulling herself up a little higher on the bed. Her arm was bound up in a temporary crêpe bandage. “After dark. I wasn’t paying attention, was I?”
He sat down heavily beside the bed on the chair that the doctor had vacated, accidentally knocking a metal kidney dish to the floor. It clanged and rattled; Strike put his prosthetic foot on it to silence it.
“Robin, how the fuck did you get away?”
“Self-defense,” she said. Then, correctly reading his expression, she said crossly, “I knew you didn’t believe I’d done any.”
“I did believe you,” he said, “but Jesus fucking Christ—”
“I had lessons from this brilliant woman in Harrogate who was ex-army,” said Robin, wincing a little as she readjusted herself on her pillows again. “After — you know what.”
“Was this before or after the advanced driving tests?”