Career of Evil

The sixteen-year-old Strike had not been sure whether or not Whittaker’s gloating, open pleasure in everything that was sadistic and demonic was genuine or a pose. All he had known was that he hated Whittaker with a visceral loathing that had transcended anything he had felt for any of the other lovers whom Leda had taken up, then left behind. He had been forced to breathe in the man’s stench as he did his homework of an evening in the squat; he had almost been able to taste him. Whittaker tried patronizing the teenager — sudden explosions and waspish put-downs revealed an articulacy he was careful to hide when he wished to ingratiate himself with Leda’s less educated friends — but Strike had been ready with put-downs and comebacks of his own and he had the advantage of being less stoned than Whittaker, or, at least, only as stoned as a person could be living in a constant fug of cannabis smoke. Out of Leda’s hearing, Whittaker had jeered at Strike’s determination to continue his oft-disrupted education. Whittaker was tall and wiry, surprisingly well muscled for one who lived an almost entirely sedentary life; Strike was already over six feet and boxing at a local club. The tension between the two stiffened the smoky air whenever both were present, the threat of violence constant.

Whittaker had driven Strike’s half-sister Lucy away for good with his bullying, his sexual taunts and sneers. He had strutted around the squat naked, scratching his tattooed torso, laughing at the fourteen-year-old girl’s mortification. One night she had run to the telephone box at the corner of the street and begged their aunt and uncle in Cornwall to come and fetch her. They had arrived at the squat at dawn next day, having driven overnight from St. Mawes. Lucy was ready with her meager possessions in a small suitcase. She had never lived with her mother again.

Ted and Joan had stood on the doorstep and pleaded with Strike to come too. He had refused, his resolve hardening with every plea Joan made, determined to sit Whittaker out, not to leave him alone with his mother. By now, he had heard Whittaker talking lucidly about what it would feel like to take a life, as though it were an epicurean treat. He had not believed, then, that Whittaker meant it, but he had known him capable of violence, and had seen him threaten their fellow squatters. Once — Leda refused to believe it had happened — Strike had witnessed Whittaker attempt to bludgeon a cat that had inadvertently woken him from a doze. Strike had wrested the heavy boot from Whittaker’s hand as he chased the terrified cat around the room, swinging at it, screaming and swearing, determined to make the animal pay.

The knee onto which the prosthesis was fitted was beginning to complain as Strike strode faster and faster along the street. The Nag’s Head pub rose up on the right as though he had conjured it, squat, square and brick. Only at the door did he catch sight of the dark-clad bouncer and remember that the Nag’s Head was another lap-dancing club these days.

“Bollocks,” he muttered.

He had no objection to semiclad women gyrating around him while he enjoyed a pint, but he could not justify the exorbitant price of drinks in such an establishment, not when he had lost two clients in a single day.

He therefore entered the next Starbucks he encountered, found a seat and heaved his sore leg onto an empty chair while he moodily stirred a large black coffee. The squashy earth-colored sofas, the tall cups of American froth, the wholesome young people working with quiet efficiency behind a clean glass counter: these, surely, were the perfect antidote to Whittaker’s stinking specter, and yet he would not be driven out. Strike found himself unable to stop reliving it all, remembering...

While he had lived with Leda and her son, Whittaker’s teenage history of delinquency and violence had been known only to social services in the north of England. The tales he told about his past were legion, highly colored and often contradictory. Only after he had been arrested for murder had the truth leaked out from people from his past who surfaced, some hoping for money from the press, some determined to revenge themselves on him, others trying in their own muddled fashion to defend him.