Four cardboard boxes stood in the middle of the sitting room, open for him to inspect. Here were his cheap and serviceable belongings, heaped together, like jumble-sale objects. He lifted a few things up to check the deeper levels, but nothing seemed to have been smashed, ripped or covered in paint. Other people his age had houses and washing machines, cars and television sets, furniture and gardens and mountain bikes and lawn mowers: he had four boxes of crap, and a set of matchless memories.
The silent room in which he stood spoke of a confident good taste, with its antique rug and its pale flesh-pink walls; its fine dark-wood furniture and its overflowing bookcases. The only change he spotted since Sunday night stood on the glass end table beside the sofa. On Sunday night there had been a picture of himself and Charlotte, laughing on the beach at St. Mawes. Now a black-and-white studio portrait of Charlotte’s dead father smiled benignly at Strike from the same silver picture frame.
Over the mantelpiece hung a portrait of an eighteen-year-old Charlotte, in oils. It showed the face of a Florentine angel in a cloud of long dark hair. Hers was the kind of family that commissioned painters to immortalize its young: a background utterly alien to Strike, and one he had come to know like a dangerous foreign country. From Charlotte he had learned that the kind of money he had never known could coexist with unhappiness and savagery. Her family, for all their gracious manners, their suavity and flair, their erudition and occasional flamboyance, was even madder and stranger than his own. That had been a powerful link between them, when first he and Charlotte had come together.
A strange stray thought came to him now, as he looked up at that portrait: that this was the reason it had been painted, so that one day, its large hazel-green eyes would watch him leave. Had Charlotte known what it would feel like, to prowl the empty flat under the eyes of her stunning eighteen-year-old self? Had she realized that the painting would do her work better than her physical presence?
He turned away, striding through the other rooms, but she had left nothing for him to do. Every trace of him, from his tooth floss to his army boots, had been taken and deposited in the boxes. He studied the bedroom with particular attention, and the room looked back at him, with its dark floorboards, white curtains and delicate dressing table, calm and composed. The bed, like the portrait, seemed a living, breathing presence. Remember what happened here, and what can never happen again.
He carried the four boxes one by one out on to the doorstep, on the last trip coming face to face with the smirking next-door neighbor, who was locking his own front door. He wore rugby shirts with the collars turned up, and always brayed with panting laughter at Charlotte’s lightest witticisms.
“Having a clear-out?” he asked.
Strike shut Charlotte’s door firmly on him.
He slid the door keys off his key ring in front of the hall mirror, and laid them carefully on the half-moon table, next to the bowl of potpourri. Strike’s face in the glass was creviced and dirty-looking; his right eye still puffy; yellow and mauve. A voice from seventeen years before came to him in the silence: “How the fuck did a pube-headed trog like you ever pull that, Strike?” And it seemed incredible that he ever had, as he stood there in the hall he would never see again.
One last moment of madness, the space between heartbeats, like the one that had sent him hurtling after her five days previously: he would stay here, after all, waiting for her to return; then cupping her perfect face in his hands and saying “Let’s try again.”
But they had already tried, again and again and again, and always, when the first crashing wave of mutual longing subsided, the ugly wreck of the past lay revealed again, its shadow lying darkly over everything they tried to rebuild.
He closed the front door behind him for the last time. The braying neighbor had vanished. Strike lifted the four boxes down the steps on to the pavement, and waited to hail a black cab.
5
STRIKE HAD TOLD ROBIN THAT he would be late into the office on her last morning. He had given her the spare key, and told her to let herself in.
She had been very slightly hurt by his casual use of the word “last.” It told her that however well they had got along, albeit in a guarded and professional way; however much more organized his office was, and how much cleaner the horrible washroom outside the glass door; however much better the bell downstairs looked, without that scrappy piece of paper taped beneath it, but a neatly typed name in the clear plastic holder (it had taken her half an hour, and cost her two broken nails, to prize the cover off); however efficient she had been at taking messages, however intelligently she had discussed the almost certainly nonexistent killer of Lula Landry, Strike had been counting down the days until he could get rid of her.
That he could not afford a temporary secretary was perfectly obvious. He had only two clients; he seemed (as Matthew kept mentioning, as though sleeping in an office was a mark of terrible depravity) to be homeless; Robin saw, of course, that from Strike’s point of view it made no sense to keep her on. But she was not looking forward to Monday. There would be a strange new office (Temporary Solutions had already telephoned through the address); a neat, bright, bustling place, no doubt, full of gossipy women as most of these offices were, all engaged in activities that meant less than nothing to her. Robin might not believe in a murderer; she knew that Strike did not believe either; but the process of proving one nonexistent fascinated her.
Robin had found the whole week more exciting than she would ever have confessed to Matthew. All of it, even calling Freddie Bestigui’s production company, BestFilms, twice a day, and receiving repeated refusals to her requests to be put through to the film producer, had given her a sense of importance she had rarely experienced during her working life. Robin was fascinated by the interior workings of other people’s minds: she had been halfway through a psychology degree when an unforeseen incident had finished her university career.
Half past ten, and Strike had still not returned to the office, but a large woman wearing a nervous smile, an orange coat and a purple knitted beret had arrived. This was Mrs. Hook, a name familiar to Robin because it was that of Strike’s only other client. Robin installed Mrs. Hook on the sagging sofa beside her own desk, and fetched her a cup of tea. (Acting on Robin’s awkward description of the lascivious Mr. Crowdy downstairs, Strike had bought cheap cups and a box of their own tea bags.)
“I know I’m early,” said Mrs. Hook, for the third time, taking ineffectual little sips of boiling tea. “I haven’t seen you before, are you new?”
“I’m temporary,” said Robin.
“As I expect you’ve guessed, it’s my husband,” said Mrs. Hook, not listening. “I suppose you see women like me all the time, don’t you? Wanting to know the worst. I dithered for ages and ages. But it’s best to know, isn’t it? Best to know. I thought Cormoran would be here. Is he out on another case?”
“That’s right,” said Robin, who suspected that Strike was actually doing something related to his mysterious personal life; there had been a caginess about him as he had told her he would be late.
“Do you know who his father is?” asked Mrs. Hook.
“No, I don’t,” said Robin, thinking that they were talking about the poor woman’s husband.
“Jonny Rokeby,” said Mrs. Hook, with a kind of dramatic relish.
“Jonny Roke—”
Robin caught her breath, realizing simultaneously that Mrs. Hook meant Strike, and that Strike’s massive frame was looming up outside the glass door. She could see that he was carrying something very large.