‘They’ve coordinated attacks like that a few times, but there’s something else: they’re setting each other up to use Kosh lines on girls.’
‘What d’you mean?’ asked Strike, fighting to concentrate.
‘Either Lepine’s Disciple or Julius will say something really vile to a girl, then Max R or Johnny B will move in and claim to have reported them. But it’s all staged, because they’re clearly friends. Lepine’s Disciple and Julius have had a few temporary suspensions for harassing girls, but they always come back.’
‘They’re potentially sacrificing their Twitter accounts so their mates can use Kosh on girls?’
‘Yes. They’re acting like… I don’t know… a kind of tag team.’
‘Any indications as to who any of them really are?’
‘No. Locations are all hidden and none of them say much about their real lives. It’s just made me wonder about Anomie,’ said Robin, sitting back on her pillows and staring at the blank face of the TV on the wall. ‘I’ve been picturing somebody pretty bitter and lonely, but clearly they’re capable of inspiring sympathy and admiration, if only from a bunch of fairly horrible people.’
‘Vikas Bhardwaj sounds like a decent bloke,’ said Strike, ‘and he knew exactly who Anomie was, and stuck with them for a long time.’
Both were silent for a while, Robin still staring at the TV on the wall, Strike vaping at his kitchen table and mostly thinking about how tired he was.
‘The new office furniture’s being delivered tomorrow, isn’t it?’ said Robin at last.
‘Afternoon, yeah,’ said Strike. ‘And in the evening I’m meeting Grant Ledwell. I was going to ask you if you’d drive me over there.’
‘Oh, thank God,’ said Robin fervently. ‘I’m going crazy, stuck in this room. Why don’t I come over to the office in the afternoon, help set everything up, and we’ll go from there?’
When Strike hesitated, she said,
‘Look, if The Halvening know where I am, they’ve had ample opportunity to come and bang on the door and pretend to be an electrician or something. I doubt they’re going to stab me on a ten-minute walk to the office, on a crowded street, in broad daylight.’
‘Yeah, all right,’ sighed Strike. ‘Come over at two.’
On this note, they hung up. Strike remained where he was for a few more minutes, exhausted, drowsy, but dreading the effort it would require to get himself into bed. His notebook lay open beside his laptop, showing the email address Yasmin had given him for Anomie, but he’d done nothing with it as yet. Unlike Yasmin, Anomie was clever: they’d surely be suspicious of any approaches from strangers right now.
Sitting in a cloud of nicotine vapour, the sky outside his window showing the edge of the moon, Strike found himself staring at his nephew Jack’s report on the Battle of Neuve Chapelle, which remained tacked up on the kitchen cupboards.
Though the village of Neuve Chapelle had been successfully captured from the Germans, it had come at the cost of staggering loss of life, not only because of a lack of munitions and poor communication, but because a thousand men had died unnecessarily, trying to make it past that uncut barbed wire surrounding the fortified German trenches.
In the slightly dreamlike state induced by the tramadol, Strike tried to visualise the Anomie case in military terms. The still-impregnable target was ringed about with wire that remained uncut: not merely the fortress-like security that Vikas Bhardwaj had built into the game, but also aided and abetted by four anonymous trolls.
So what was the lesson to be drawn from Neuve Chapelle? Cut the wire before sending your infantry forwards.
Strike yawned yet again, too tired to push the analogy any further and, pre-emptively wincing, pushed himself up from his chair.
Meanwhile, in the Z Hotel, Robin had already got into bed, but her brain remained stubbornly alert, continuing to throw up ideas and tentative theories as though it were shuffling a deck of cards and showing her random pictures. Having tried to sleep for twenty minutes, she turned her bedside light back on, sat up and opened her notebook to the last page she’d written, where she’d listed the usernames of the four accounts that had been so useful to Anomie, and to each other.
After a while, and unsure why she was doing it, Robin reached for the pen on her bedside table and wrote down a fifth name: Zoltan, Rachel ’s first-ever online friend, whom Rachel believed had then adopted another online persona, called… What had it been? For some reason Robin had a vague mental image of a harlequin.
She now bent over the side of her bed to pick up her charging laptop, opened it and searched ‘harlequin’.
‘Scaramouche,’ she said aloud, once she’d read an article about stock characters in Italian Commedia dell’Arte. Scaramouche was a clown: cunning, boastful and fundamentally cowardly, an odd name to choose if you were trying to persuade young women into sex. Again, without really knowing why she was doing it, Robin wrote Scaramouche beneath Zoltan, stared for a moment at the six names, then reached again for her laptop.
99
We never know how high we are
Till we are called to rise…
‘If you’re not going to say anything,’ came Pat’s deep, irritable voice from the outer office, ‘stop bloody calling.’
It was half-past one on Monday afternoon and Strike, who was sitting at his desk in the inside office, crutches propped against the wall, was eating biscuits while he dealt with his overburdened email inbox. Now he called through to Pat,
‘Same number? Just breathing again?’
‘Couldn’t hear any breathing this time,’ said Pat, coming to the open door, e-cigarette in hand. Behind her, the outer office was almost empty but for the phone sitting on the floor and the piles of case files Pat was sorting, ready to go into the new filing cabinets. ‘Just silence. Bloody idiot.’
‘Might call that number back when I’ve dealt with this lot,’ said Strike, returning to an email from the landlord, who seemed to feel that the bombing justified an increase in rent, a view Strike didn’t share. ‘You all right?’
‘Why wouldn’t I be?’ asked Pat suspiciously.
‘Being back in here,’ said Strike. ‘After what happened.’
‘I’m fine. They’ve got them all now, haven’t they? And I hope they throw away the bloody key,’ Pat added, moving back to her files.
Strike returned to his email. A couple of minutes later, having sent a polite but firm response to the landlord, he started writing an update for Allan Yeoman. He was still trying to word his opening paragraph in a way that suggested progress without actually mentioning any when he heard Pat say,
‘You’re not supposed to be in today.’
Strike glanced up, assuming Robin had arrived early, but it was Dev Shah who appeared in the doorway between the inner and outer offices, wearing a broad grin.
‘Nailed them,’ he told Strike. ‘Fingers and his old dear.’
‘You serious?’ said Strike, gladly abandoning his email.
‘Yep. Chatted her up last night in the Connaught bar. She was there with her sister. Or a woman who uses the same plastic surgeon.’