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Once, she might have started screaming, indifferent to the presence of witnesses, but he could tell she knew that tactic would be unwise now that he wasn’t bound to her.
‘Charlotte,’ he said in a low voice, leaning towards her to make sure he wasn’t overheard, ‘I don’t know how many different ways I can make this clear to you. We’re done. I wish you well, but we’re finished. If you’ve got cancer—’
‘So you do think I’m lying?’
‘Let me finish. If you’ve got cancer, you should be focusing on your health and your loved ones.’
‘My loved ones,’ she repeated. ‘I see.’
She sat back against the leather bench and wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. A couple of men at the bar were watching. Perhaps Charlotte, too, had sensed she had an audience, because she now covered her face with her hands and began to sob.
For fuck’s sake.
‘When were you diagnosed?’ he asked her, to stop her crying.
She looked up at once, mopping her sparkling eyes.
‘Last week. Friday.’
‘How?’
‘I went for a routine check on Tuesday, and… yeah, so they phoned me on Friday, and told me they’d found something.’
‘And they already know it’s cancer?’
‘Yes,’ she said, too fast.
‘Well, as I say… I hope you’re OK.’
He made to get up, but she reached across the table and grabbed his wrist tightly.
‘Corm, please hear me out. Seriously. Please. Please. This is life and death. I mean, that makes a person… you remember,’ she whispered, staring into his eyes, ‘after you got your leg blown off… I mean, my God… it makes you realise what’s important. After that, you wanted me. Didn’t you? Wasn’t I the only person in the world you wanted, then?’
‘Did I?’ said Strike, looking into her beautiful face. ‘Or did I just take what was on offer, because it was easiest?’
She recoiled, letting go of his wrist.
All relationships have their own agreed mythology, and central to his and Charlotte’s had been their shared belief that at the lowest point of his life, when he was lying in a hospital bed with half his leg and his military career gone, her return had saved him, giving him something to hold on to, to live for. He knew he’d just shattered a sacred taboo, desecrating what was for her not only a source of pride, but the foundation of her certainty that, however much he might deny it, he continued to love the woman who’d been generous enough to love a mutilated man now career-less and broke.
‘I hope you’ll be OK.’
He got to his feet before she could recover herself enough to retaliate, and walked out, half expecting a beer glass to hit him on the back of the head. By a happy stroke of providence, a vacant black cab slid into view as he stepped out onto the pavement and, barely two minutes after he’d left her, he was speeding away, back towards Denmark Street.
19
Nine at the top means:
The standstill comes to an end.
The I Ching or Book of Changes
‘… a conspiracy so vast, it is literally unseeable, because we live within it, because it forms our sky and our earth, and so the only way – the only way – to escape, is to step, quite literally, into a different reality, the true reality.’
It was Saturday morning. Robin had been sitting in the Rupert Court Temple for three quarters of an hour. Today’s speaker was the man she’d seen lecturing Will Edensor in Berwick Street, who’d introduced himself as Papa J’s son, Taio. This had earned him a smattering of applause, in which Robin joined while recalling Kevin Pirbright’s description of Taio as the UHC’s ‘volatile enforcer’.
Taio, who wore his hair in a dark, straggly bob, had the same large blue eyes as his father, and might also have had Jonathan’s square jaw, had he not been carrying several stone of extra weight, which had added a second chin below the first. He put Robin in mind of an overfed rat: his nose was long and pointed and his mouth unusually small. Taio’s speech was forceful and didactic, and while there were occasional murmurs of agreement from the congregation as he talked, nobody wept and nobody laughed.
In the front row of the temple sat the well-known novelist Giles Harmon, who Robin had recognised when he passed her in the entrance. A short man who wore his silver hair dandyishly long, Harmon had fine, almost delicate features, and carried himself self-consciously, like a man expecting to be watched. He’d been accompanied into the temple by a striking man of around forty, who had black hair, Eurasian features and a deep scar running down from the side of his nose, which was slightly crooked, to his jaw. The pair had moved up the aisle slowly, waving to acquaintances and temple attendants. Unlike Noli Seymour, the two men made no show of humility, but smiled approvingly as temple-goers made way for them, and moved a row back.
