Career of Evil

Robin’s brain seemed to grind back into gear again.

“So is Wardle—?”

“Compassionate leave,” said Strike. “Guess who’s taken over from him?”

“Not Anstis?” Robin asked, suddenly worried.

“Worse than that,” said Strike.

“Not — not Carver?” said Robin, with a sudden presentiment of doom.

Of the policemen whom Strike had managed to offend and upstage during his two most famous detective triumphs, Detective Inspector Roy Carver had been the most comprehensively outclassed and was consequently the most deeply embittered. His failings during the investigation into a famous model’s fall from her penthouse flat had been extensively documented and, indeed, exaggerated in the press. A sweaty man with dandruff and a mottled, purple face like corned beef, he had had an antipathy towards Strike even before the detective had publicly proven that the policeman had failed to spot murder.

“Right in one,” said Strike. “I’ve just had him here for three hours.”

“Oh, God — why?”

“Come off it,” said Strike, “you know why. This is a wet dream for Carver, having an excuse to interrogate me about a series of murders. He stopped just short of asking me for alibis, and he spent a hell of a lot of time on those fake letters to Kelsey.”

Robin groaned.

“Why on earth would they let Carver—? I mean, with his record—”

“Hard though it might be for us to believe, he hasn’t been a dickhead his entire career. His bosses must think he was unlucky with Landry. It’s supposed to be only temporary, while Wardle’s off, but he’s already warned me to stay well away from the investigation. When I asked how inquiries into Brockbank, Laing and Whittaker were going, he as good as told me to fuck off with my ego and my hunches. We’ll be getting no more inside information on the progress of the case, I can promise you that.”

“He’ll have to follow up Wardle’s lines of investigation, though,” said Robin, “won’t he?”

“Given that he’d clearly rather chop off his own knob than let me solve another of his cases, you’d think he’d be careful to follow up all my leads. Trouble is, I can tell he’s rationalized the Landry case as me getting lucky, and I reckon he thinks me coming up with three suspects in this case is pure showboating. I wish to hell,” said Strike, “we’d got an address for Brockbank before Wardle had to leave.”

As Robin had been silent for a whole minute while she listened to Strike, the dressmaker clearly thought it reasonable to check whether she was ready to resume the fitting, and poked her head in through the curtain. Robin, whose expression was suddenly beatific, waved her away impatiently.

“We have got an address for Brockbank,” Robin told Strike in a triumphant voice as the curtains swung closed again.

“What?”

“I didn’t tell you, because I thought Wardle would already have got it, but I thought, just in case — I’ve been ringing round the local nurseries, pretending I was Alyssa, Zahara’s mum. I said I wanted to check they had our new address right. One of them read it out to me off the parent contact sheet. They’re living on Blondin Street in Bow.”

“Jesus Christ, Robin, that’s fucking brilliant!”

When the dressmaker returned to her job at last, she found a considerably more radiant bride than she had left. Robin’s lack of enthusiasm for the process of altering her dress had been diminishing the seamstress’s pleasure in her job. Robin was easily the best-looking client on her books and she had hoped to get a photograph for advertising purposes once the dress was finished.

“That’s wonderful,” said Robin, beaming at the seamstress as she tugged the last seam straight and together they contemplated the vision in the mirror. “That’s absolutely wonderful.”

For the first time, she thought that the dress really didn’t look bad at all.

51

Don’t turn your back, don’t show your profile,

You’ll never know when it’s your turn to go.

                        Blue Öyster Cult, “Don’t Turn Your Back”

“The public response has been overwhelming. We’re currently following up over twelve hundred leads, some of which look promising,” said Detective Inspector Roy Carver. “We continue to appeal for information on the whereabouts of the red Honda CB750 used to transport part of Kelsey Platt’s body and we remain interested in speaking to anybody who was in Old Street on the night of 5^th June, when Heather Smart was killed.”

The headline POLICE FOLLOW NEW LEADS IN HUNT FOR SHACKLEWELL RIPPER was not really justified, in Robin’s view, by anything in the brief report beneath, although she supposed that Carver would not share details of genuine new developments with the press.

Five photographs of the women now believed to have been victims of the Ripper filled most of the page, their identities and their brutal fates stamped across their chests in black typeface.

Martina Rossi, 28, prostitute, stabbed to death, necklace stolen.