Career of Evil

One minor problem... he didn’t know where she was. He’d lost the trail. She hadn’t been to the office this morning. He’d gone to the LSE, where he’d spotted the platinum bitch, but seen no sign of The Secretary. He’d looked in the Court; he’d even checked the Tottenham. This was a temporary setback, though. He’d sniff her out. He’d pick her up again tomorrow morning at West Ealing station, if he had to.

He made himself a coffee and poured a slug of whisky into it from a bottle he’d had here for months. There was hardly anything else in the dirty hidey-hole where he hid his treasures, in his secret sanctuary: a kettle, a few chipped mugs, the fridge — the altar of his profession — an old mattress to sleep on and a docking port for him to place his iPod on. That was important. It had become part of his ritual.

He had thought they were shit when he’d first heard them, but as his obsession with bringing down Strike had grown, so had his liking for their music. He liked to listen to it through earphones while he was stalking The Secretary, while he was cleaning his knives. It was sacred music to him now. Some of their lyrics stayed with him like fragments of a religious service. The more he listened, the more he felt they understood.

Women were reduced to the elemental when they were facing the knife. They became cleansed by their terror. There was a kind of purity to them as they begged and pleaded for their lives. The Cult (as he privately called them) seemed to understand. They got it.

He put his iPod into the dock and selected one of his favorite tracks, “Dr. Music.” Then he headed to the sink and the cracked shaving mirror he kept there, razor and scissors at the ready: all the tools a man needed to totally transform himself.

From the single speaker of the dock, Eric Bloom sang:

Girl don’t stop that screamin’
You’re sounding so sincere...

47

I sense the darkness clearer...

                        Blue Öyster Cult, “Harvest Moon”

Today — June the first — Robin was able to say for the first time: “I’m getting married next month.” July the second suddenly seemed very close. The dressmaker back in Harrogate wanted a final fitting, but she had no idea when she would be able to fit in a trip home. At least she had her shoes. Her mother was taking the RSVPs and updating her regularly on the guest list. Robin felt strangely disconnected from it all. Her tedious hours of surveillance in Catford Broadway, staking out the flat over the chip shop, were a world away from queries on the flowers, who should sit beside whom at the reception, and (this last from Matthew) whether or not she had yet asked Strike for the fortnight off for the honeymoon, which Matthew had booked and which was to be a surprise.

She did not know how the wedding could have come so close without her realizing. Next month, the very next month, she would become Robin Cunliffe — at least, she supposed she would. Matthew certainly expected her to take his name. He was incredibly cheerful these days, hugging her wordlessly when he passed her in the hall, raising not a single objection to the long hours she was working, hours that bled into their weekends.

He had driven her to Catford on the last few mornings because it was on the way to the company he was auditing in Bromley. He was being nice about the despised Land Rover now, even while he crashed the gears and stalled it at junctions, saying what a wonderful gift it had been, how kind Linda was to have given it to them, how useful a car was when he was sent somewhere out of town. During yesterday’s commute he had offered to remove Sarah Shadlock from the wedding guest list. Robin could tell that he had had to screw up his courage even to ask the question, afraid that mentioning Sarah’s name might provoke a row. She had thought about it for a while, wondering how she really felt, and finally said no.

“I don’t mind,” she said. “I’d rather she came. It’s fine.”

Removing Sarah from the list would tell Sarah that Robin had found out what had happened years before. She would rather pretend that she had always known, that Matthew had confessed long ago, that it was nothing to her; she had her pride. However, when her mother, who had also queried Sarah’s attendance, asked whom Robin wanted to put on Sarah’s free side, now that Sarah and Matthew’s mutual university friend Shaun couldn’t make it, Robin answered with a question.

“Has Cormoran RSVP’d?”

“No,” said her mother.

“Oh,” said Robin. “Well, he says he’s going to.”

“You want to put him next to Sarah, do you?”

“No, of course not!” snapped Robin.

There was a short pause.

“Sorry,” said Robin. “Sorry, Mum... stressed... no, could you sit Cormoran next to... I don’t know...”

“Is his girlfriend coming?”

“He says not. Put him anywhere, just not near bloody — I mean, not by Sarah.”