Career of Evil

Robin let her knife and fork fall with a clatter, feeling on Strike’s behalf all the offense that she assumed him to be experiencing. His contact list! As though his amputation was a rare artefact that Strike had bought on the black market...

Strike questioned both Jason and Tempest for another fifteen minutes before concluding that they knew nothing more of any use. The picture they painted of their one meeting with Kelsey was of an immature and desperate girl whose urge to be amputated was so powerful that she would, by the consent of both of her cyberfriends, have done anything to achieve it.

“Yeah,” sighed Tempest, “she was one of those. She’d already had a go when she was younger, with some wire. We’ve had people so desperate they’ve put their legs on train tracks. One guy tried to freeze his leg off in liquid nitrogen. There was a girl in America who deliberately botched a ski jump, but the danger with that is you might not get exactly the degree of disability you’re after—”

“So what degree are you after?” Strike asked her. He had just put up a hand for the bill.

“I want my spinal cord severed,” said Tempest with total composure. “Paraplegic, yeah. Ideally I’ll have it done by a surgeon. In the meantime, I just get on with it,” she said, gesturing again to her wheelchair.

“Using the disabled bathrooms and stairlifts, the works, eh?” asked Strike.

“Cormoran,” said Robin in a warning voice.

She had thought this might happen. He was stressed and sleep-deprived. She supposed she ought to be glad that they had got all the information they needed first.

“It’s a need,” said Tempest composedly. “I’ve known ever since I was a child. I’m in the wrong body. I need to be paralyzed.”

The waiter had arrived; Robin held out her hand for the bill, because Strike hadn’t noticed him.

“Quickly, please,” she said to the waiter, who looked sullen. He was the man Strike had barked at for putting ice in his beer glass.

“Know many disabled people, do you?” Strike was asking Tempest.

“I know a couple,” she said. “Obviously we’ve got a lot in—”

“You’ve got fuck all in common. Fuck all.”

“I knew it,” muttered Robin under her breath, snatching the chip and pin machine out of the waiter’s grip and shoving in her Visa card. Strike stood up, towering over Tempest, who looked suddenly unnerved, while Jason shrank back in his seat, looking as though he wanted to disappear inside his hoodie.

“C’mon, Corm—” said Robin, ripping her card out of the machine.

“Just so you know,” said Strike, addressing both Tempest and Jason as Robin grabbed her coat and tried to pull him away from the table, “I was in a car that blew up around me.” Jason had put his hands over his scarlet face, his eyes full of tears. Tempest merely gaped. “The driver was ripped in two — that’d get you some attention, eh?” he said savagely to Tempest. “Only he was dead, so not so fucking much. The other guy lost half his face — I lost a leg. There was nothing voluntary about—”

“OK,” said Robin, taking Strike’s arm. “We’re off. Thanks very much for meeting us, Jason—”

“Get some help,” said Strike loudly, pointing at Jason as he allowed Robin to pull him away, diners and waiters staring. “Get some fucking help. With your head.”

They were out in the leafy road, nearly a block away from the gallery, before Strike’s breathing began to return to normal.

“OK,” he said, though Robin had not spoken. “You warned me. I’m sorry.”

“That’s all right,” she said mildly. “We got everything we wanted.”

They walked on in silence for a few yards.

“Did you pay? I didn’t notice.”

“Yes. I’ll take it out of petty cash.”

They walked on. Well-dressed men and women passed them, busy, bustling. A bohemian-looking girl with dreadlocks floated past in a long paisley dress, but a five-hundred-pound handbag revealed that her hippy credentials were as fake as Tempest’s disability.

“At least you didn’t punch her,” said Robin. “In her wheelchair. In front of all the art lovers.”

Strike began to laugh. Robin shook her head.

“I knew you’d lose it,” she sighed, but she was smiling.

44 Then Came the Last Days of May

He had thought she was dead. It had not troubled him that he hadn’t seen a news report, because she’d been a hooker. He’d never seen anything in the papers about the first one he’d done either. Prostitutes didn’t fucking count, they were nothing, no one cared. The Secretary was the one who was going to make the big splash, because she was working for that bastard — a clean-living girl with her pretty fiancé, the kind the press went wild for...

He didn’t understand how the whore could still be alive, though. He remembered the feeling of her torso beneath the knife, the popping, puncturing sound of the metal slitting her skin, the grating of steel on bone, the blood gushing. Students had found her, according to the newspaper. Fucking students.

He still he had her fingers, though.