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‘Well, keep your eyes peeled for muttering men, or for a tall black guy with green eyes.’
Robin promised to do so, and rang off.
Strike pulled out his vape pen, inhaled deeply, then picked up Kim Cochran’s CV again. Like Midge, Cochran was ex-police, and had only worked for Patterson for six months before the bugging scandal had sunk the business. Strike was just thinking that she might be worth an interview, when the landline rang in the outer office.
Charlotte, he thought at once – and then, with a strange chill, he remembered that Charlotte was dead.
Getting to his feet, he walked through to Pat’s desk, and answered.
‘Cormoran Strike.’
‘Oh,’ said a female voice. ‘I was going to leave a message, I didn’t expect anyone to—’
‘Who’s this?’
‘Amelia Crichton,’ said Charlotte’s sister.
‘Ah,’ said Strike, bitterly regretting that he hadn’t let the call go to voicemail. ‘Amelia.’
He was momentarily stymied for appropriate words. They hadn’t seen each other in years, and hadn’t liked each other, then.
‘Very sorry about… I’m sorry,’ said Strike.
‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘I was just calling to say, I’m back in town next week and I’d like to see you, if that’s possible.’
Possible, he thought, just not desirable.
‘To tell you the truth, I’m very busy at the moment. Would it be all right if I call you when I know I’ve got a couple of free hours?’
‘Yes,’ she said coldly, ‘all right.’
She gave him her mobile number and rang off, leaving Strike irked and unsettled. If he knew Charlotte, she’d left some kind of dirty bomb behind her, which her sister felt honour bound to pass on: a message, or a note, or some legacy in her will designed to haunt and oppress him, to be one last, and lasting, ‘fuck you’.
Strike returned to the inner office only to pick up the UHC file and Kim Cochran’s CV, then left through the glass door, which he locked. He felt as though Amelia’s call had temporarily polluted his workspace, leaving a wraith of Charlotte peering at him vengefully from the shadows, defying him to return callously to work when he’d just (as she’d undoubtedly see it) turned his back on her, one more time.
108
… one must move warily, like an old fox walking over ice… deliberation and caution are the prerequisites of success.
The I Ching or Book of Changes
When she arrived at 1 Great George Street the following day at half past twelve, Robin discovered that she’d been quite wrong in vaguely imagining the Institute of Civil Engineers would be based in a brutalist building where function had been prioritised over elegance. Rufus Fernsby’s place of work was a gigantic Edwardian building of considerable grandeur.
When she gave the name of the man she’d come to see, Robin was sent up a crimson-carpeted staircase which, coupled with the white walls, reminded her faintly of the farmhouse at Chapman Farm. She passed oil paintings of eminent engineers, and a stained-glass window with a coat of arms supported by a crane and a beaver bearing the motto Scientia et Ingenio, and finally reached a long open-plan room with rows of desks, where two men stood having what looked like a heated discussion while the other workers kept their heads down.
With one of those strange intuitions that admit of no explanation, Robin guessed immediately that the taller, angrier and odder looking of the two men was Rufus Fernsby. Perhaps he looked like the kind of man who’d slam down a phone on someone who mentioned his unsatisfactory father. His argument with the shorter man seemed to centre on whether somebody called Bannerman should, or shouldn’t, have forwarded an email.
‘Nobody’s claiming Grierson shouldn’t have been copied in,’ he was saying heatedly, ‘that’s not the point. What I’m raising here is a pattern of persistent—’
The shorter man, becoming aware of Robin, and possibly looking for a route of escape, said,
‘Can I help you?’
‘—failure to follow an established procedure, which increases the risk of miscommunications, because I might not have realised—’
‘I’m here to meet Rufus Fernsby.’
As she’d feared, the taller man broke off mid-sentence to say angrily,
