Career of Evil

Matthew elbowed him aside. Strike did not protest. He felt he deserved it. He watched as Robin’s fiancé tore off in her direction, then, after hesitating, turned to the double doors and walked out into the night.

The clear sky was now dusted with stars. Once he reached the street he paused to light a cigarette, dragging on it as Wardle had done, as though the nicotine were the stuff of life. He began to walk, feeling the pain in his knee now. With every step, he liked himself less.

“RICKY!” bawled a woman down the street, imploring an escaping toddler to return to her as she struggled with the weight of a large bag. “RICKY, COME BACK!”

The little boy was giggling manically. Without really thinking what he was doing, Strike bent down automatically and caught him as he sped towards the road.

“Thank you!” said the mother, almost sobbing her relief as she jogged towards Strike. Flowers toppled off the bag in her arms. “We’re visiting his dad — oh God—”

The boy in Strike’s arms struggled frantically. Strike put him down beside his mother, who was picking up a bunch of daffodils off the pavement.

“Hold them,” she told the boy sternly, who obeyed. “You can give them to Daddy. Don’t drop them! Thanks,” she said again to Strike and marched away, keeping a tight grip on the toddler’s free hand. The little boy walked meekly beside his mother now, proud to have a job to do, the stiff yellow flowers upright in his hand like a scepter.

Strike walked on a few paces and then, quite suddenly, stopped dead in the middle of the pavement, staring as though transfixed by something invisible hanging in the cold air in front of him. A chilly breeze tickled his face as he stood there, completely indifferent to his surroundings, his focus entirely inward.

Daffodils... lily of the valley... flowers out of season.

Then the sound of the mother’s voice echoed through the night again — “Ricky, no!” — and caused a sudden explosive chain reaction in Strike’s brain, lighting a landing strip for a theory that he knew, with the certainty of a prophet, would lead to the killer. As the steel joists of a building are revealed as it burns, so Strike saw in this flash of inspiration the skeleton of the killer’s plan, recognizing those crucial flaws that he had missed — that everyone had missed — but which might, at last, be the means by which the murderer and his macabre schemes could be brought down.

53

You see me now a veteran of a thousand psychic wars...

                        Blue Öyster Cult, “Veteran of the Psychic Wars”

It had been easy to feign insouciance in the brightly lit hospital. Robin had drawn strength, not merely from Strike’s amazement and admiration at her escape, but from listening to her own account of fighting off the killer. She had been the calmest of them all in the immediate aftermath of the attack, consoling and reassuring Matthew when he began to cry at the sight of her ink-stained face and the long wound in her arm. She had drawn strength from everyone else’s weakness, hoping that her adrenaline-fueled bravery would carry her safely back to normality, where she would find a sure footing and move on unscathed, without having to pass through the dark mire where she had lived so long after the rape...

However, during the week that followed she found it almost impossible to sleep, and not only because of the throbbing of her injured forearm, which was now in a protective half-cast. In the short dozes she managed at night or by day, she felt her attacker’s thick arms around her again and heard him breathing in her ear. Sometimes the eyes she had not seen became the eyes of the rapist when she was nineteen: pale, one pupil fixed. Behind their black balaclava and gorilla mask, the nightmare figures merged, mutated and grew, filling her mind day and night.

In the worst dreams, she watched him doing it to somebody else and was waiting her turn, powerless to help or escape. Once, the victim was Stephanie with her pulverized face. On another unbearable occasion, a little black girl screamed for her mother. Robin woke from that one shouting in the dark, and Matthew became so worried about her that he called in sick to work the following day so that he could stay with her. Robin did not know whether she was grateful or resentful.

Her mother came, of course, and tried to make her come home to Masham.

“You’ve got ten days until the wedding, Robin, why don’t you just come home with me now and relax before—”

“I want to stay here,” said Robin.