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Could he have stopped it happening? Yes, probably, but at what cost? Ongoing contact, escalating demands and pleas to reunite with a woman who lived half addicted to her own pain. He’d long since abandoned the hope of any possibility of real change in Charlotte, because of her adamantine resistance to any succour but drink, drugs and Cormoran Strike.
He drove out of rainswept Cromer thinking about Charlotte’s messy, fractured family, which was littered with step-parents and half-siblings and riven with feuds and addiction. Our beloved Charlotte…
Strike was passing Chapman Farm. He glanced left, and spotted that odd tower on the horizon again. On a whim, he took the next left turn. He was going to find out what that tower actually was.
Why on earth this, now? said Charlotte’s angry voice in his head. What does it matter?
It matters to me, Strike replied silently.
His one unfailing refuge and distraction in times of trouble, ever since he could remember, had been to detangle and unravel, to try and impose order on the chaotic world, to resolve mysteries, to scratch his persistent itch for truth. Finding out what that tower really was had nothing to do with Charlotte, yet had everything to do with Charlotte. He wasn’t a little boy any more, vaguely threatened by the watching tower, even though there were far more things to worry about closer at hand, with his mother out of sight in the woods and predators all around him. Nor was he the nineteen-year-old who’d fallen in love with Oxford’s most beautiful student, too dazzled and disarmed that she seemed to love him back to see her clearly. If he did nothing else today, he’d demystify the tower that had lurked in his memory as a symbol of one of the worst times of his life.
It took him only a few minutes to reach the hilltop in the BMW, and there it was: a church, as he should have known it would be: a very old Norfolk church, faced with flint rubble like so many of the buildings he’d passed in Cromer.
He got out of the car. A sign at the entrance to the small graveyard told him this was St John the Baptist Church. Driven by impulses he didn’t fully understand he passed through the gate, and found himself trying the door of the church. He’d expected it to be locked, but it opened.
The interior was small, white-walled, and empty. Strike’s footsteps echoed as he walked up the aisle, eyes fixed on a plain gold cross on the altar. Then he sat down on one of the hard wooden pews.
He didn’t believe in God, but some of the people he’d loved and admired did. His Aunt Joan had had an unshowy faith, and her belief in certain forms and structures had provided a jarring contrast to his mother’s disdain for boundaries and every form of small-town respectability. Joan had made Strike and Lucy go to Sunday school during their spells in St Mawes, and these sessions had bored and oppressed him as a child, yet the memory of those lessons was strangely pleasing as he sat on the hard pew: how much sweeter had the dash to the beach been, afterwards? How much more satisfying the games of imagination he and Lucy had played, once released from the tiresome activities they were forced to do while Ted and Joan were taking communion? Perhaps, he thought vaguely, a bit of boredom was no bad thing for kids.
Footsteps behind Strike made him look round.
‘Good morning,’ said the newcomer, a man in late middle age with a long, pale face and mild eyes, like a sheep. His trousers were fastened with bicycle clips, which Strike hadn’t seen for years.
‘Morning,’ said the detective.
‘Everything ollright?’
Strike wondered whether the man was the rector. He wore no dog collar, but then, of course, it wasn’t Sunday. How can you think about that now, why do you care about his dog collar, why this mania for working things out?
‘Someone I know’s just died.’
‘I’m very sorry to hear that,’ said the man, with such obvious sincerity that Strike said, as though to console the stranger,
‘She’d been unwell for a long time.’
‘Ah,’ said the man. ‘Still.’
‘Yeah,’ said Strike.
‘I’ll leave you,’ said the other, his voice now hushed, and he proceeded down the aisle and out of sight, into what Strike assumed was the vestry, probably removing himself so that Strike could pray in peace. He did in fact close his eyes, though not to speak to God. He knew what Charlotte would have said to him now, if she were here.
I’m out of your hair now, Bluey. You should be glad.
I didn’t want you dead, he answered, inside his head.
But you knew you were the only one who could save me. I warned you, Bluey.
You can’t hold onto someone by threatening to top yourself if they leave. It isn’t right. You had kids. You should have stayed alive for them.
Ah, OK. He could visualise her cold smile. Well, if that’s how you want to frame this. I’m dead. I can’t argue.
Don’t play that game with me. His anger was rising as though she were really here in this silent church. I gave you everything I had to give. I put up with shit I’ll never put up with again.
Robin’s a saint, is she? How boring, said Charlotte, now smirking at him. You used to like a challenge.
She’s not a saint any more than I am, but she’s a good person.
And now, to his anger, he felt tears coming.
