‘You didn’t think we’d find Vikas Bhardwaj with his jugular severed either.’
‘Funny,’ said Robin coolly, now turning to face her partner, ‘I don’t remember you predicting that either.’
‘The difference,’ said Strike impatiently, ‘is that I’ve learned my bloody lesson. I’m coming with you. If we go to Junction Road now, we’ll have plenty of time before Ledwell’s at nine.’
When Strike had disappeared back into the inner office to collect his phone and wallet, Pat said, in the low growl that passed for her whisper,
‘He’s right, you know.’
‘No he bloody isn’t,’ said Robin, taking the pages out of the printer and reaching up onto the shelf behind Pat for a plastic sleeve to put them in. ‘If he tries punching anyone else, or if he falls downstairs again, he’ll be out of action for—’
She broke off as Strike returned to the outer office, still glowering.
‘Ready?’
Robin knew, by the expression on her partner’s face, that he’d overheard what she’d just said.
100
But a wild courage sits triumphant there,
The stormy grandeur of a proud despair;
A daring spirit, in its woes elate,
Mightier than death, untameable by fate.
Neither detective spoke during the first ten minutes of the drive to Junction Road. Strike was smouldering with quiet resentment about the fact that Robin currently considered him a liability rather than an asset. Ever sensitive to her partner’s moods, Robin felt the prickly quality of his silence, and spent the early part of the journey trying to muster both the courage and the right words to address it.
At last, as they sat waiting for a traffic light to change, she said, eyes on the road ahead,
‘You said to me once that we’ve got to be honest with each other or we’re screwed.’
Strike kept his silence until the light turned green and they were moving forward again.
‘So?’
‘You said you worried more about me when I was out on my own than you’d worry about a male subcontractor, because the odds were always going to be against me if I came up against a violent—’
‘Exactly,’ said Strike, ‘which is why—’
‘Can I finish?’ said Robin, her tone calm, though her pulse was racing.
‘Carry on,’ said Strike coldly.
‘And you told me I needed to fix my panic attacks, because you didn’t want it on your conscience if I screwed up and got hurt again.’
Strike, who now knew exactly where the conversation was heading, set his jaw in a manner that Robin, had she seen it, would have described as mulish.
‘I’ve never nagged you about you looking after yourself,’ said Robin, her eyes still fixed on the road. ‘Not once. It’s your life, and your body. But the day you told me I had to get therapy, you said it wasn’t only me who’d have to live with the consequences if I got myself killed.’
‘So?’ said Strike again.
A mixture of masochism and sadism made him want to force her to be explicit. Now starting to feel aggravated, Robin said,
‘I know you’re in pain. You look terrible.’
‘Cheers. Just the shot in the arm I needed.’
‘Oh, for God’s—’ said Robin, now barely keeping a curb on her temper. ‘You’d never let anyone else go out on a job in your condition. How exactly do you think you’re going to defend yourself, or me, if—?’
‘So I’m dead weight in my own fucking agency, am I?’
‘Don’t twist my words, you know exactly what I’m saying—’
‘Yeah, I’m a middle-aged cripple you’d rather leave in the car—’
‘Who said anything about your age?’
‘—while you walk merrily into what could be—’
‘“Merrily”? Could you be any more patronising?’
‘—a fucking ambush—’
‘I’ve factored that in and—’
‘Oh, you’ve factored that in, have you? That’ll stop you being fucking stabbed through the neck when you walk in the door—’
‘FOR CHRIST’S SAKE, STRIKE!’ Robin shouted, slapping the steering wheel with both hands, the tension she’d been carrying with her since the bombing finding cathartic relief at last, ‘I DON’T WANT YOU TO FUCKING KILL YOURSELF! I know you feel – I don’t know – emasculated by being on crutches, or something—’
‘No, I bloody don’t—’
‘You talk about honesty, but you’re not fucking honest, not with me, not with yourself! You know why I’m saying this: I don’t want to lose you. Happy now?’
‘No, I’m not fucking happy,’ said Strike automatically, which was both true and untrue: in some barely acknowledged part of his brain he’d registered her words, and they’d lightened a burden he’d barely known he was carrying. ‘I think we’re dealing with a fucking serial killer here—’
‘So do I!’ said Robin, infuriated by the lack of acknowledgement of something it had cost her a great deal to admit. ‘But I know Zoe, and you don’t!’
‘Know her? You had one twenty-minute walk with her—’
‘Sometimes, twenty minutes is enough! She was terrified on the phone just now, and I don’t think it’s because Anomie had a knife to her throat: it’s because she’s about to betray Anomie! I know you think I’m some ditsy, naive fool who “merrily” walks into dangerous situations—’
‘I don’t think that,’ said Strike. ‘I don’t.’
Now there was silence in the BMW. Strike was processing what he’d just heard. I don’t want to lose you. Was that something a woman would say about what he feared, in his darkest moments, he’d become? A crock, a fat, forty-year-old, one-legged chain-smoker, deluded about his attractiveness and competence, still imagining himself the gifted amateur boxer with a washboard stomach who’d been capable of pulling the most beautiful woman at Oxford University?
But Robin wasn’t feeling comforted; on the contrary, she felt vulnerable and exposed, because she’d just said what she’d been trying not to say for a long time, and was scared that Strike had heard in that ‘I don’t want to lose you’ more than her worry that he’d do himself some cataclysmic injury in hauling himself up the steep concrete steps in Zoe’s building. She feared he’d divined her pain at the idea of Madeline, and her wish for an intimacy that she was trying to persuade herself she didn’t crave.
After a few minutes she said, trying to keep her voice even and rational,
‘You are this agency. It’d be nothing without you. I’ve never told you to rest up, or stop smoking, or eat better. It wasn’t my business – but now you’re making it my business. I’ve got a rape alarm in my bag and whoever’s in Zoe’s room when I get there, I’ll make sure they know I didn’t come alone. You look mean enough, even sitting in a car. Anyone looking out of the window’s going to think twice about hurting me, knowing you’re right outside, but you won’t be able to get up those stairs without endangering yourself, and I’d be more worried about you than myself if somebody came at us.’
Strike said nothing, because he was enduring the always-humiliating experience of facing his own hypocrisy and delusion. If it came to a knife fight, he was less than useless.