‘Did they find Blay’s phone? The dossier?’ asked Strike, who was evidently far more mentally alert today than he’d been the last time Robin visited.
‘Yes. It was all hidden under a floorboard he’d prised up, with Josh’s genuine letter to Edie and the latex masks – everything.’
‘So those voice-change calls,’ said Strike, who’d had plenty of time to think while lying in bed. ‘They were from Flavia, right?’
‘God, you’re good,’ said Robin, impressed. ‘They were, yes. She saw Gus replace Josh’s letter with his own, in the kitchen, where Katya had left her handbag. He had his back to Flavia and she crept upstairs without Gus realising she’d seen. She told me she got the idea for the voice change from Bram telling her about those noise apps. She’s a really clever, observant girl.’
‘Well, let’s hope her mother keeps her off the internet,’ said Strike, reaching for the bar of chocolate. ‘We don’t need another fucking criminal genius in the family.’
‘She wants to be a detective,’ said Robin. ‘She told me so yesterday.’
‘We should offer her an internship. Why didn’t she tell her mother what she saw Gus doing with the letter? Fear?’
‘Well, she can’t say it openly in front of Katya, but yes, I think she was absolutely terrified of Gus. If you ask me, Flavia was the only one in the family who sensed what he really was. You know, she kind of tried to tell us, or to hint – remember her saying “Maybe you’ll have to come back again” after we went to their house. She told me she saw Elliot Rodger’s shooting spree on the news while Gus was in hospital. I checked: that was the day Edie was hospitalised for the suicide attempt, and Anomie disappeared from Twitter and the game over the same couple of days. It was one of the bits of so-called proof that Edie was Anomie, which the Peach brothers put in that dossier.’
‘Hm,’ said Strike, wincing slightly as he adjusted himself on his pillows, ‘well, we could’ve done with slightly less oblique hints. But next time I say, “How d’you fancy X as our culprit?” let’s just stop the investigation right there until we’ve ruled out X.’
‘Duly noted,’ said Robin, smiling.
‘Get this. Angela Darwish dropped by yesterday,’ said Strike, and Robin felt a flicker of resentment that Darwish had been permitted to see Strike ahead of her own second visit, ‘and she told me the fucker was bugging the upstairs. He’s been very busy on the dark web, buying all his kit. He was able to hear everything Josh and Katya were saying to each other, and Edie too, before she stopped going round to their house. But he’s been hoist by his own petard, because the bugs picked up what happened before we arrived on the street.
‘Apparently the Royal College of Music called that afternoon to say Gus hadn’t turned up to talk to his tutor, hadn’t submitted any of his agreed work and, basically, that he’d been lying to his parents for most of the year about attending private tuition and was about to get chucked out. After a solid hour of Inigo telling him what a useless little shit he was, Gus went down to his room, grabbed the machete, went back upstairs and stabbed Inigo repeatedly in the chest and neck.’
Robin had already known all of this, because Murphy had told her, but made appropriate noises of interest. She had a feeling Strike needed to know things she didn’t right now.
‘And he said they’ve interviewed the Barretts as well, but he didn’t tell me how that went.’
‘Murphy told me a bit,’ said Robin. ‘Darcy was three years ahead of Gus at the Royal College of Music, and she felt sorry for him because he was such a loner, so she asked him to a party one weekend.’
‘Women’s capacity for pity is bloody dangerous,’ said Strike through a mouthful of dark chocolate. He’d have preferred a Twix, but it was still a damn sight better than hospital food.
‘So Gus told Katya Darcy was his new girlfriend. She was really happy he’d found someone, because he’s always been “a bit awkward with girls”.’
‘No shit.’
‘According to the Barretts, Gus turned up at the party and then sat on a sofa fiddling with his phone all evening, not speaking to anyone and looking livid because Darcy had an actual boyfriend there. Gus must’ve hacked Marcus’s iCloud that night, because the Barretts never invited him back, due to the fact that he followed Darcy into the bathroom at 2 a.m. and forcibly attempted to kiss her.’
‘I’m starting to see why he needed Kosh,’ said Strike.
‘She shouted and struggled, and her boyfriend and brother chucked him out, but she never reported him to the college or anything. As I say, she felt sorry for him – it was Rachel and Zoltan all over again. Zoltan told Rachel his father was abusive, so she cut him a lot of slack – until the rape and death threats started.’
‘Sounds like Gus has been living in a completely delusional world, where every woman who’s polite to him wants to screw him.’
‘I think that’s exactly it,’ said Robin soberly. ‘Katya told me Edie used to be nice to Gus when she visited the house. When Inigo made the kids go along to North Grove, Edie encouraged Gus about his drawing and told him she’d been a real introvert when she was a teenager too. I think that was all the contact they ever had, but again, he built it all up in his head, thinking she was keen on him. Then Edie criticised the game publicly… and he turned.’
‘Are his hives even real?’
‘Yes,’ said Robin, ‘but when the police got inside his room they found all this food he wasn’t supposed to be eating, hidden away in odd corners, because it triggered outbreaks. He didn’t want to go back to college, he just wanted to stay in his room and be Anomie… I’ve been thinking about Rule 14, you know, too. All that anonymity. I don’t think it was only that he and Morehouse were scared of their parents and universities finding out what they were up to. I don’t think Gus could stand the idea of creating a game where other people could flirt with each other. He wanted total control and enforced abstinence for the players – and meanwhile he was desperately trying Kosh lines on girls all over Twitter.’
‘You know,’ said Strike, who’d had time to mentally review the case as he lay in bed, ‘all of this could’ve been avoided if people had just opened their fucking eyes. Inigo and Katya, not bothering to check what their son’s up to, forever holed up in his room. And Grant bloody Ledwell – if he’d looked at the handwriting on the envelope and compared it to the letter, if he’d shown it to the police instead of deciding Blay must just be a money-grubber, which is the worst bit of projection I’ve seen in a while, Vikas Bhardwaj might still be alive.’
‘“She’s my sister”,’ quoted Robin. ‘From what Murphy told me, I don’t think Vikas’s parents were anything like Inigo – they didn’t seem like bullies in the slightest – but Murphy says they were astounded to learn that Vikas had co-created the game, because they thought all he cared about was science.’
‘All adolescents need something their parents don’t know about,’ said Strike. ‘Just a pity some of them choose murder.’
‘But that explains the initial bond between Gus and Vikas, doesn’t it? They were both so precociously good in their separate fields, and must’ve been feeling a lot of pressure, and neither of them were having any luck with girls… you can see how it happened, how they became friends… Shall I put that card up for you?’
He handed it over, but his bedside table was already so crammed with handmade cards from each of his nephews, and shop-bought cards from Lucy and Ted, that as Robin attempted to balance Flavia’s there she accidentally knocked a large one to the floor. As she bent to pick it up she saw a long handwritten message, and the signature ‘Madeline’.