Career of Evil

The single berth, with its fold-down sink and its narrow bunk, might be tiny, but his army career had taken him to far more uncomfortable places. He was pleased to find that the bed could just accommodate his six foot three and after all, a small space was always easier to navigate once his prosthesis had been removed. Strike’s only gripe was that the compartment was overheated: he kept his attic flat at a temperature every woman he knew would have deplored as icy, not that any woman had ever slept in his attic flat. Elin had never even seen the place; Lucy, his sister, had never been invited over lest it shatter her delusion that he was making plenty of money these days. In fact, now he came to think about it, Robin was the only woman who had ever been in there.

The train jolted into motion. Benches and pillars flickered past the window. Strike sank down on the bunk, unwrapped the first of his bacon baguettes and took a large mouthful, remembering as he did so Robin sitting at his kitchen table, white-faced and shaken. He was glad to think of her at home in Masham, safely out of the way of possible harm: at least he could stow one nagging worry.

The situation in which he now found himself was deeply familiar. He might have been back in the army, traveling the length of the UK as cheaply as possible, to report to the SIB station in Edinburgh. He had never been stationed there. The offices, he knew, were in the castle that stood on top of a jagged rock outcrop in the middle of the city.

Later, after swaying along the rattling corridor to pee, he undressed to his boxer shorts and lay on top of the thin blankets to sleep, or rather to doze. The side-to-side rocking motion was soothing, but the heat and the changing pace of the train kept jarring him out of sleep. Ever since the Viking in which he was being driven had blown up around him in Afghanistan, taking half his leg and two colleagues with it, Strike had found it difficult to be driven by other people. Now he discovered that this mild phobia extended to trains. The whistle of an engine speeding past his carriage in the opposite direction woke him like an alarm three times; the slight sway as the train cornered made him imagine the terror of the great metal monster overbalancing, rolling, crashing and smashing apart...

The train pulled into Edinburgh Waverley at a quarter past five, but breakfast was not served until six. Strike woke to the sound of a porter moving down the carriage, delivering trays. When Strike opened his door, balancing on one leg, the uniformed youth let out an uncontrolled yelp of dismay, his eyes on the prosthesis which lay on the floor behind Strike.

“Sorry, pal,” he said in a thick Glaswegian accent as he looked from the prosthesis to Strike’s leg, realizing that the passenger had not, after all, hacked off his own leg. “Whit a reddy!”

Amused, Strike took the tray and closed the door. After a wakeful night he wanted a cigarette much more than a reheated, rubbery croissant, so he set about reattaching the leg and getting dressed, gulping black coffee as he did so, and was among the first to step out into the chilly Scottish early morning.

The station’s situation gave the odd feeling of being at the bottom of an abyss. Through the concertinaed glass ceiling Strike could make out the shapes of dark Gothic buildings towering above him on higher ground. He found the place near the taxi rank where Hardacre had said he would pick him up, sat down on a cold metal bench and lit up, his backpack at his feet.

Hardacre did not appear for twenty minutes, and when he did so, Strike felt a profound sense of misgiving. He had been so grateful to escape the expense of hiring a car that he had felt it would be churlish to ask Hardacre what he drove.

A Mini. A fucking Mini...

“Oggy!”

They performed the American half-hug, half-handshake that had permeated even the armed forces. Hardacre was barely five foot eight, an amiable-looking investigator with thinning, mouse-colored hair. Strike knew his nondescript appearance hid a sharp investigative brain. They had been together for the Brockbank arrest, and that alone had been enough to bond them, with the mess it had landed them in afterwards.

Only when he watched his old friend folding himself into the Mini did it seem to occur to Hardacre that he ought to have mentioned the make of car he drove.

“I forgot you’re such a big bastard,” he commented. “You gonna be all right to drive this?”

“Oh yeah,” said Strike, sliding the passenger seat as far back as it could go. “Grateful for the lend, Hardy.”

At least it was an automatic.

The little car wound its way out of the station and up the hill to the soot-black buildings that had peered down at Strike through the glass roof. The early morning was a cool gray.