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‘Strike.’
‘Hi,’ said a bold, husky voice. ‘Surprise.’
‘Who’s this?’
‘Bijou. Bijou Watkins. We met at the christening.’
‘Oh,’ said Strike, a memory of cleavage and legs blotting out darker thoughts, and this, at least, was welcome. ‘Hi.’
‘I s’pose you’ve got plans,’ she said, ‘but I’m all dressed up and my friend I was s’posed to be meeting tonight’s ill.’
‘How did you get my number?’
‘Ilsa,’ said Bijou, with the cackle of laughter he remembered from the Herberts’ kitchen. ‘Told her I needed a detective, for a case I’m working on… I don’t think she believed me,’ she added, with another cackle.
‘No, well, she’s quick like that,’ said Strike, holding the mobile a little further from his ear, which made the laugh slightly less jarring. He doubted he could stand that for long.
‘So… want a drink? Or dinner? Or whatever?’
He looked down at the cellophaned tuna in his hand. He remembered the cleavage. He’d given up smoking and takeaways. Robin was cooking dinner for Ryan Murphy.
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Why not?’
13
Nine at the beginning means:
The footprints run crisscross.
The I Ching or Book of Changes
The extreme taciturnity of Clive Littlejohn, the agency’s newest subcontractor, was starting to grate on people other than Robin.
‘There’s something wrong wi’ him,’ Littlejohn’s fellow subcontractor, Barclay, told Robin on Wednesday morning, as both sat watching the entrance to a block of flats in Bexleyheath from Barclay’s car.
‘Better him than Morris or Nutley,’ said Robin, loyally parroting Strike’s line.
‘That’s a low fuckin’ bar,’ said Barclay.
‘He’s doing the job OK,’ said Robin.
‘He just fuckin’ stares,’ said Barclay. ‘Doesn’t blink. Like a fuckin’ lizard.’
‘I’m pretty sure lizards blink,’ said Robin. ‘Wait – is that one of them?’
‘No,’ said Barclay, leaning forwards to squint through the windscreen at a man who’d just exited the building. ‘He’s fatter than ours.’
Inside the block of flats they were watching lived two brothers in their forties who, unfortunately for the agency’s newest investigation, closely resembled each other. One of them – a few days’ surveillance hadn’t yet identified which – was stalking an actress called Tasha Mayo. The police weren’t taking the matter seriously enough for the client, who was starting to become, in her own words, ‘freaked out’. A series of trivial incidents, at first merely irksome, had lately turned sinister with the posting of a dead bird through the woman’s letter box, and then with the gluing up of the keyhole on her front door.
‘I mean, I know the police are overstretched,’ Tasha had told Robin, while the latter was taking down the details of the case at the office. ‘I get that, and I know there’s been no direct threat, but I’ve told them who I think’s doing it, I’ve given them a physical description and where he lives and everything, because he’s told me most of his life story in segments. He’s always hanging around the stage door and I’ve signed about fifteen posters and bits of paper. Things turned nasty when I told him I hadn’t got time for another selfie. And he keeps turning up places I go. I just want it to stop. Someone keyed my car last night. I’ve had enough. I need you to catch him in the act.’
This wasn’t the first stalking case the agency had tackled, but none had yet involved dead birds, and Robin, who felt sympathetic towards the client, was hoping to catch the perpetrator sooner rather than later.
‘Midge fancies her,’ said Barclay, watching the suspect’s window.
‘Who, Tasha Mayo?’
‘Aye. Did ye see that film she was in, about those two Victorian lesbians?’
