Strike smoked his cigarette and continued to scrutinize the front of the building, in particular the gap between the windows on the first floor and those on the third. He was thinking primarily about Freddie Bestigui, the film producer. According to what Robin had found on the internet, Bestigui had been in bed asleep when Lula Landry toppled over the balcony two floors above. The fact that it was Bestigui’s own wife who had sounded the alarm, and insisted that the killer was still upstairs while her husband stood beside her, implied that she, at least, did not think him guilty. Nevertheless, Freddie Bestigui had been the man in closest proximity to the dead girl at the time of her death. Laymen, in Strike’s experience, were obsessed with motive: opportunity topped the professional’s list.
Unwittingly confirming her civilian status, Robin said:
“But why would someone pick the middle of the night to have an argument with her? Nothing ever came out about her not getting on with her neighbors, did it? And Tansy Bestigui definitely couldn’t have done it, could she? Why would she run downstairs and tell the security guard if she’d just pushed Lula over the balcony?”
Strike did not answer directly; he seemed to be following his own train of thought, and after a moment or two replied:
“Bristow’s fixated on the quarter of an hour after his sister went inside, after the photographers had left and the security guard had abandoned the desk because he was ill. That meant the lobby became briefly navigable—but how was anyone outside the building supposed to know that Wilson had left his post? The front door’s not made of glass.”
“Plus,” interjected Robin intelligently, “they’d have needed to know the key code to open the front door.”
“People get slack. Unless the security people change it regularly, loads of undesirables could have known that code. Let’s have a look down here.”
They walked in silence right to the end of Kentigern Gardens, where they found a narrow alleyway which ran, at a slightly oblique angle, along the rear of Landry’s block of houses. Strike was amused to note that the alley was called Serf’s Way. Wide enough to allow a single car to pass, it had plentiful lighting and was devoid of hiding places, with long, high, smooth walls on either side of the cobbled passageway. They came in due course to a pair of large, electrically operated garage doors, with an enormous PRIVATE sign affixed to the wall beside them, which guarded the entrance to the underground cache of parking spaces for the Kentigern Gardeners.
When he judged that they were roughly level with the back of number 18, Strike made a leap, caught hold of the top of the wall and heaved himself up to look into a long row of small, carefully manicured gardens. Between each patch of smooth and well-tended lawn and the house to which it belonged was a shadowy stairwell to basement level. Anyone wishing to climb the rear of the house would, in Strike’s opinion, require ladders, or a partner to belay him, and some sturdy ropes.
He let himself slide back down the wall, emitting a stifled grunt of pain as he landed on the prosthetic leg.
“It’s nothing,” he said, when Robin made a concerned noise; she had noticed the vestige of a limp, and wondered whether he had sprained an ankle.
The chafing on the end of the stump was not helped by hobbling off over the cobbles. It was much harder, given the rigid construction of his false ankle, to navigate uneven surfaces. Strike asked himself ruefully whether he had really needed to hoist himself up on the wall at all. Robin might be a pretty girl, but she could not hold a candle to the woman he had just left.
3
“AND YOU’RE SURE HE’S A detective, are you? Because anyone can do that. Anyone can google people.”
Matthew was irritable after a long day, a disgruntled client and an unsatisfactory encounter with his new boss. He did not appreciate what struck him as naive and misplaced admiration for another man on the part of his fiancée.
“He wasn’t googling people,” said Robin. “I was the one doing the googling, while he was working on another case.”
“Well I don’t like the sound of the set-up. He’s sleeping in his office, Robin; don’t you think there’s something a bit fishy there?”
“I told you, I think he’s just split up with his partner.”
“Yeah, I’ll bet he has,” said Matthew.
Robin dropped his plate down on top of her own and stalked off into the kitchen. She was angry at Matthew, and vaguely annoyed with Strike, too. She had enjoyed tracking Lula Landry’s acquaintance across cyberspace that day; but seeing it retrospectively through Matthew’s eyes, it seemed to her that Strike had given her a pointless, time-filling job.
“Look, I’m not saying anything,” Matthew said, from the kitchen doorway. “I just think he sounds weird. And what’s with the little afternoon walks?”
“It wasn’t a little afternoon walk, Matt. We went to see the scene of the—we went to see the place where the client thinks something happened.”
“Robin, there’s no need to make such a bloody mystery about it,” Matthew laughed.
“I’ve signed a confidentiality agreement,” she snapped over her shoulder. “I can’t tell you about the case.”
“The case.”
He gave another short, scoffing laugh.
Robin strode around the tiny kitchen, putting away ingredients, slamming cupboard doors. After a while, watching her figure as she moved around, Matthew came to feel that he might have been unreasonable. He came up behind her as she was scraping the leftovers into the bin, put his arms around her, buried his face in her neck and cupped and stroked the breast that bore the bruises Strike had accidentally inflicted, and which had irrevocably colored Matthew’s view of the man. He murmured conciliatory phrases into Robin’s honey-colored hair; but she pulled away from him to put the plates into the sink.
Robin felt as though her own worth had been impugned. Strike had seemed interested in the things she had found online. Strike expressed gratitude for her efficiency and initiative.
“How many proper interviews have you got next week?” Matthew asked, as she turned on the cold tap.
“Three,” she shouted over the noise of the gushing water, scrubbing the top plate aggressively.
She waited until he had walked away into the sitting room before turning off the tap. There was, she noticed, a fragment of frozen pea caught in the setting of her engagement ring.
4
STRIKE ARRIVED AT CHARLOTTE’S FLAT at half past nine on Friday morning. This gave her, he reasoned, half an hour to be well clear of the place before he entered it, assuming that she really was intending to leave, rather than lie in wait for him. The grand and gracious white buildings that lined the wide street; the plane trees; the butcher’s shop that might have been stuck in the 1950s; the cafés bustling with the upper middle classes; the sleek restaurants; they had always felt slightly unreal and stagey to Strike. Perhaps he had always known, deep down, that he would not stay, that he did not belong.
Until the moment he unlocked the front door, he expected her to be there; yet as soon as he stepped over the threshold, he knew that the place was empty. The silence had that slack quality that speaks only of the indifference of uninhabited rooms, and his footsteps sounded alien and overloud as he made his way down the hall.