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Robin moved into the heart of the party as people crowded into the kitchen from the marquee. For a moment or two, she’d been reminded of the tensions of her former marriage: she hadn’t liked Murphy’s question, nor had she appreciated Strike pushing to find out whether she was committed to the job as much as the single Midge.
‘You hold Benjy,’ said Ilsa, when Robin reached her. ‘Then I can stand behind you. I’ll look thinner.’
‘You’re being silly, you look great,’ murmured Robin, but she accepted her sleeping godson and turned to face the camera, which was being held by Ilsa’s red-faced uncle. There was much jostling and repositioning behind the island on which the christening cake stood: camera phones were held high. Ilsa’s tipsy mother trod painfully on Robin’s foot and apologised to Strike instead. The sleeping baby was surprisingly heavy.
‘Cheese!’ bellowed Ilsa’s uncle.
‘It suits you!’ called Murphy, toasting Robin.
Out of the corner of her eye, Robin saw a blaze of shocking pink: Bijou Watkins had found her way to Strike’s other side. The flash went off several times, the baby in Robin’s arms stirred but slept on, and the moment was captured for posterity: the proud grandmother’s bleary smile, Ilsa’s anxious expression, the light reflected on Nick’s glasses so that he looked vaguely sinister, and the slightly forced smiles on the faces of both godparents, who were pressed together behind the blue icing teddy bear, Strike ruminating on what Murphy had just said, Robin noticing how Bijou leaned into her detective partner, determined to feature in the picture.
3
To be circumspect and not to forget one’s armour is the right way to security.
The I Ching or Book of Changes
Strike arrived back in his attic flat in Denmark Street at eight that evening, with the gassy sensation champagne always gave him, feeling vaguely depressed. Usually he’d have grabbed a takeaway on the way home, but on leaving hospital after a three-week stay the previous year he’d been given strict instructions about weight loss, physiotherapy and giving up smoking. For the first time since his leg had been blown off in Afghanistan, he’d done as the doctors ordered.
Now, without much enthusiasm, he put vegetables in a newly purchased steamer, took a salmon fillet out of the fridge and measured out some wholegrain rice, all the time trying not to think about Robin Ellacott, and succeeding only in so far as he remained aware of how difficult it was not to think about her. He might have left hospital with many good resolutions, but he’d also been burdened with an intractable problem that couldn’t be solved by lifestyle changes: a problem that, in truth, he’d had far longer than he cared to admit, but which he’d finally faced only when lying in his hospital bed, watching Robin leave for her first date with Murphy.
For several years now, he’d told himself that an affair with his detective partner wasn’t worth risking his most important friendship for, or jeopardising the business they’d built together. If there were hardships and privations attached to a life lived resolutely alone in a small attic flat above his office, Strike had considered them a price well worth paying for independence and peace after the endless storms and heartache of his long, on-off relationship with Charlotte. Yet the shock of hearing that Robin was heading off for a date with Ryan Murphy had forced Strike to admit that the attraction he’d felt towards Robin from the moment she’d first taken off her coat in his office had slowly mutated against his will into something else, something he’d finally been forced to name. Love had arrived in a form he didn’t recognise, which was doubtless why he’d become aware of the danger too late to head it off.
For the first time since he’d met Robin, Strike had no interest in pursuing a separate sexual relationship as a distraction from and a sublimation of any inconvenient feelings he might have for his partner. The last time he’d sought solace with another woman, beautiful as she’d been, he’d ended up with a stiletto heel puncture on his leg and a sense of grim futility. He still didn’t know whether, in the event of Robin’s relationship with Murphy ending, as he devoutly hoped it would, he’d force a conversation he’d once have resisted to the utmost, with a view to ascertaining Robin’s own true feelings. The objections to an affair with her remained. On the other hand (‘It suits you!’ that prick Murphy had said, seeing Robin with a baby in her arms), he feared the business partnership might break up in any case, because Robin would decide marriage and children appealed more than a detective career. So here stood Cormoran Strike, slimmer, fitter, clearer of lung, alone in his attic, poking broccoli angrily with a wooden spoon, thinking about not thinking about Robin Ellacott.
The ringing of his mobile came as a welcome distraction. Taking salmon, rice and vegetables off the heat, he answered.
‘Awright, Bunsen?’ said a familiar voice.
‘Shanker,’ said Strike. ‘What’s up?’
The man on the phone was an old friend, though Strike would have been hard pressed to remember his real name. Strike’s mother, Leda, had scraped the motherless and incurably criminal sixteen-year-old Shanker off the street after he’d been stabbed and brought him home to their squat. Shanker had subsequently become a kind of stepbrother to Strike, and was probably the only human being who’d never seen any flaws in the incurably flighty, novelty-chasing Leda.
‘Need some ’elp,’ said Shanker.
‘Go on,’ said Strike.
‘Need to find a geezer.’
‘What for?’ said Strike.
‘Nah, it ain’t what you fink,’ said Shanker. ‘I ain’ gonna mess wiv ’im.’
‘Good,’ said Strike, taking a drag on the vape pen that continued to supply him with nicotine. ‘Who is he?’
‘Angel’s farver.’
‘Whose father?’
‘Angel,’ said Shanker, ‘me stepdaughter.’
‘Oh,’ said Strike, surprised. ‘You got married?’
‘No,’ said Shanker impatiently, ‘but I’m living wiv ’er mum, in’ I?’
‘What is it, child support?’
‘Nah,’ said Shanker. ‘We’ve just found out Angel’s got leukaemia.’
