Career of Evil

“The eldest stepdaughter was called Brittany. When she was twelve, Brittany disclosed sexual abuse to a school friend in Germany. The friend told her mother, who reported it. We were called in — I didn’t interview her personally, that was a female officer. I just saw the tape.”

What had crucified him was how grown-up she had tried to be, how together. She was terrified of what would happen to the family now she had blabbed, and was trying to take it back.

No, of course she hadn’t told Sophie that he had threatened to kill her little sister if she told on him! No, Sophie wasn’t lying, exactly — it had been a joke, that was all. She’d asked Sophie how to stop yourself having a baby because — because she’d been curious, everyone wanted to know stuff like that. Of course he hadn’t said he’d carve up her mum in little pieces if she told — the thing about her leg? Oh, that — well, that was a joke, too — it was all joking — he told her she had scars on her leg because he’d nearly cut her leg off when she was little, but her mum had walked in and seen him. He’d said he did it because she’d trodden on his flowerbeds when she was a toddler, but of course it was a joke — ask her mum. She’d got stuck in some barbed wire, that was all, and badly cut trying to pull herself free. They could ask her mum. He hadn’t cut her. He’d never cut her, not Daddy.

The involuntary expression she had made when forcing herself to say “Daddy” was with Strike still: she had looked like a child trying to swallow cold tripe, under threat of punishment. Twelve years old and she had learned life was only bearable for her family if she shut up and took whatever he wanted to do without complaint.

Strike had taken against Mrs. Brockbank from their first interview. She had been thin and over made-up, a victim, no doubt, in her way, but it seemed to Strike that she had voluntarily jettisoned Brittany to save the other two children, that she turned two blind eyes to the long absences from the house of her husband and eldest child, that her determination not to know was tantamount to collaboration. Brockbank had told Brittany that he would strangle both her mother and her sister if she ever spoke about what he did to her in the car when he took her on lengthy excursions into nearby woods, into dark alleyways. He would cut all of them up into little bits and bury them in the garden. Then he’d take Ryan — Brockbank’s small son, the only family member whom he seemed to value — and go where no one would ever find them.

“It was a joke, just a joke. I didn’t mean any of it.”

Thin fingers twisting, her glasses lopsided, her legs not long enough for her feet to reach the floor. She was still refusing point blank to be physically examined when Strike and Hardacre went to Brockbank’s house to bring him in.

“He was pissed when we got there. I told him why we’d come and he came at me with a broken bottle.

“I knocked him out,” said Strike without bravado, “but I shouldn’t’ve touched him. I didn’t need to.”

He had never admitted this out loud before, even though Hardacre (who had backed him to the hilt in the subsequent inquiry) had known it as well.

“If he came at you with a bottle—”

“I could’ve got the bottle off him without decking him.”

“You said he was big—”

“He was pretty pissed. I could’ve managed him without punching him. Hardacre was there, it was two on one.

“Truth is, I was glad he came at me. I wanted to punch him. Right hook, literally knocked him senseless — which is how he got away with it.”

“Got away with—”

“Got off,” said Strike. “Got clean away.”

“How?”

Strike drank more coffee, his eyes unfocused, remembering.

“He was hospitalized after I hit him because he had a massive epileptic seizure when he came out of the concussion. Traumatic brain injury.”

“Oh God,” said Robin.

“He needed emergency surgery to stop the bleeding from his brain. He kept having fits. They diagnosed TBI, PTSD and alcoholism. Unfit to stand trial. Lawyers came stampeding in. I was put on an assault charge.

“Luckily, my legal team found out that, the weekend before I hit him, he’d played rugby. They dug around a bit and found out he’d taken a knee to the head from an eighteen-stone Welshman and been stretchered off the field. A junior medic had missed the bleeding from his ear because he was covered in mud and bruises, and just told him to go home and take it easy. As it turned out, they’d missed a basal skull fracture, which my legal team found out when they got doctors to look at the post-match X-ray. The skull fracture had been done by a Welsh forward, not me.

“Even so, if I hadn’t had Hardy as a witness to the fact that he’d come at me with the bottle, I’d have been in it up to my neck. In the end, they accepted that I’d acted in self-defense. I couldn’t have known his skull was already cracked, or how much damage I’d do by punching him.