Robin said nothing. She was lying on her and Matthew’s bed with a number of newspapers that she had bought against Linda and Matthew’s wishes spread around her. Her eyes were fixed on a double-page spread in the Mirror, where the five supposed victims of the Shacklewell Ripper were again pictured in a row. A sixth black silhouette of a woman’s head and shoulders represented Robin. The legend beneath the silhouette read “26-year-old office worker, escaped.” Much was made of the fact that the 26-year-old office worker had managed to spray the killer with red ink during the attack. She was praised by a retired policewoman in a side column for her foresight in carrying such a device, and there was a separate feature on rape alarms over the page.
“You’ve really given up on it?” she asked.
“It’s not a question of giving up,” said Strike. She could hear him moving around the office, and she wished she were there, even if only making tea or answering emails. “I’m leaving it to the police. A serial killer’s out of our league, Robin. It always was.”
Robin was looking down at the gaunt face of the only other woman who had survived the killing spree. “Lila Monkton, prostitute.” Lila, too, knew what the killer’s pig-like breathing sounded like. He had cut off Lila’s fingers. Robin would only have a long scar on her arm. Her brain buzzed angrily in her skull. She felt guilty that she had got off so lightly.
“I wish there was something—”
“Drop it,” said Strike. He sounded angry, just like Matthew. “We’re done, Robin. I should never have sent you to Stephanie. I’ve let my grudge against Whittaker color my judgment ever since that leg arrived and it nearly got you—”
“Oh for God’s sake,” said Robin impatiently. “You didn’t try and kill me, he did. Let’s keep the blame where it belongs. You had good reason for thinking it was Whittaker — the lyrics. Anyway, that still leaves—”
“Carver’s looked into Laing and Brockbank and he doesn’t think there’s anything there. We’re staying out of it, Robin.”
Ten miles away in his office, Strike hoped that he was convincing her. He had not told Robin about the epiphany that had occurred to him after his encounter with the toddler outside the hospital. He had tried to contact Carver the following morning, but a subordinate had told him that Carver was too busy to take his call and advised him not to try again. Strike had insisted on telling the irritable and faintly aggressive subordinate what he had hoped to tell Carver. He would have bet his remaining leg that not a word of his message had been passed on.
The windows in Strike’s office were open. Hot June sunshine warmed the two rooms now devoid of clients and soon, perhaps, to be vacated due to an inability to afford the rent. Two-Times’s interest in the new lap-dancer had petered out. Strike had nothing to do. Like Robin, he yearned for action, but he did not tell her that. All he wanted was for her to heal and be safe.
“Police still in your street?”
“Yes,” she sighed.
Carver had placed a plainclothes officer in Hastings Road around the clock. Matthew and Linda took immense comfort in the fact that he was out there.
“Cormoran, listen. I know we can’t—”
“Robin, there’s no ‘we’ just now. There’s me, sitting on my arse with no work, and there’s you, staying at bloody home until that killer’s caught.”
“I wasn’t talking about the case,” she said. Her heart was banging hard and fast against her ribs again. She had to say it aloud, or she would burst. “There’s one thing we — you can do, then. Brockbank might not be the killer, but we know he’s a rapist. You could go to Alyssa and warn her she’s living with—”
“Forget it,” said Strike’s voice harshly in her ear. “For the last fucking time, Robin, you can’t save everyone! He’s never been convicted! If we go blundering in there, Carver will string us up.”
There was a long silence.
“Are you crying?” Strike asked anxiously, because he thought her breathing had become ragged.
“No, I’m not crying,” said Robin truthfully.
An awful coldness had spread through her at Strike’s refusal to help the young girls living in Brockbank’s vicinity.
“I’d better go, it’s lunch,” she said, though nobody had called her.
“Look,” he said, “I get why you want—”
“Speak later,” she said and hung up.
There’s no “we” just now.
It had happened all over again. A man had come at her out of the darkness and had ripped from her not only her sense of safety, but her status. She had been a partner in a detective agency...
Or had she? There had never been a new contract. There had never been a pay rise. They had been so busy, so broke, that it had never occurred to her to ask for either. She had simply been delighted to think that that was how Strike saw her. Now even that was gone, perhaps temporarily, perhaps forever. There’s no “we” anymore.
Robin sat in thought for a few minutes, then got off the bed, the newspapers rustling. She approached the dressing table where the white shoebox sat, engraved with the silver words Jimmy Choo, reached out a hand and stroked the pristine surface of the cardboard.
The plan did not come to her like Strike’s epiphany outside the hospital, with the exhilarating force of flame. Instead it rose slowly, dark and dangerous, born of the hateful enforced passivity of the past week and out of ice-cold anger at Strike’s stubborn refusal to act. Strike, who was her friend, had joined the enemy’s ranks. He was a six-foot-three ex-boxer. He would never know what it was like to feel yourself small, weak and powerless. He would never understand what rape did to your feelings about your own body: to find yourself reduced to a thing, an object, a piece of fuckable meat.
Zahara had sounded three at most on the telephone.
Robin remained quite still in front of her dressing table, staring down at the box containing her wedding shoes, thinking. She saw the risks plainly spread beneath her, like the rocks and raging waters beneath a tightrope walker’s feet.
No, she could not save everyone. It was too late for Martina, for Sadie, for Kelsey and for Heather. Lila would spend the rest of her days with two fingers on her left hand and a grisly scar across her psyche that Robin understood only too well. However, there were also two young girls who faced God knows how much more suffering if nobody acted.
Robin turned away from the new shoes, reached for her mobile and dialed a number she had been given voluntarily, but which she had never imagined she would use.
54
And if it’s true it can’t be you,
It might as well be me.
She had three days in which to plan, because she had to wait for her accomplice to get hold of a car and find a gap in his busy schedule. Meanwhile she told Linda that her Jimmy Choos were too tight for her, the style too flashy, and allowed her mother to accompany her as she exchanged them for cash. Then she had to decide what lie she was going to tell Linda and Matthew, to buy sufficient time away from them to put her plan into action.
She ended up telling them that she was to have another police interview. Insisting that Shanker remain in the car when he picked her up was key to maintaining that illusion, as was getting Shanker to pull up alongside the plainclothes policeman still patrolling their street and telling him that she was off to get her stitches out, which in reality would not happen for another two days.
It was now seven o’clock on a cloudless evening and apart from Robin, who was leaning up against the warm brick wall of the Eastway Business Centre, the scene was deserted. The sun was making its slow progress towards the west and on the distant, misty horizon, at the far end of Blondin Street, the Orbit sculpture was rising into existence. Robin had seen plans in the papers: it would soon look like a gigantic candlestick telephone wrapped in its own twisted cord. Beyond it, Robin could just make out the growing outline of the Olympic stadium. The distant view of the gigantic structures was impressive and somehow inhuman, worlds and worlds away from the secrets she suspected were hidden behind the newly painted front door she knew to be Alyssa’s.