Career of Evil

“Your injury’s a legacy of war. It represents bravery, adversity overcome. Your amputation’s mentioned every single time they talk about you in the press. I think — for him — it’s tied up with fame and achievement and — and honor. He’s trying to denigrate your injury, to tie it to something horrible, divert the public’s perception away from you as hero towards you as a man in receipt of part of a dismembered girl. He wants to cause you trouble, yes, but he wants to diminish you in the process. He’s somebody who wants what you’ve got, who wants recognition and importance.”

Strike bent down and took a second can of McEwan’s out of the brown bag at his feet. The crack of the ring pull reverberated in the cold air.

“If you’re right,” said Strike, watching his cigarette smoke curl away into the darkness, “if what’s riling this maniac is that I got famous, Whittaker goes to the top of the list. That was all he ever wanted: to be a celebrity.”

Robin waited. He had told her virtually nothing about his stepfather, although the internet had supplied her with many of the details that Strike had withheld.

“He was the most parasitic fucker I’ve ever met,” said Strike. “It’d be like him to try and siphon off a bit of fame from someone else.”

She could feel him becoming angry again beside her in the small space. He reacted consistently at every mention of each of the three suspects: Brockbank made him guilty, Whittaker angry. Laing was the only one he discussed with anything like objectivity.

“Hasn’t Shanker come up with anything yet?”

“Says he’s in Catford. Shanker’ll track him down. Whittaker’ll be there, somewhere, in some filthy corner. He’s definitely in London.”

“Why are you so sure?”

“Just London, isn’t it?” said Strike, staring across the car park at the terraced houses. “He came from Yorkshire originally, Whittaker, you know, but he’s pure cockney now.”

“You haven’t seen him for ages, have you?”

“I don’t need to. I know him. He’s part of the junk that washes up in the capital looking for the big time and never leaves. He thought London was the only place that deserved him. Had to be the biggest stage for Whittaker.”

Yet Whittaker had never managed to claw his way out of the dirty places of the capital where criminality, poverty and violence bred like bacteria, the underbelly where Shanker still dwelled. Nobody who had not lived there would ever understand that London was a country unto itself. They might resent it for the fact that it held more power and money than any other British city, but they could not understand that poverty carried its own flavor there, where everything cost more, where the relentless distinctions between those who had succeeded and those who had not were constantly, painfully visible. The distance between Elin’s vanilla-columned flat in Clarence Terrace and the filthy Whitechapel squat where his mother had died could not be measured in mere miles. They were separated by infinite disparities, by the lotteries of birth and chance, by faults of judgment and lucky breaks. His mother and Elin, both beautiful women, both intelligent, one sucked down into a morass of drugs and human filth, the other sitting high over Regent’s Park behind spotless glass.

Robin, too, was thinking about London. It had Matthew in its spell, but he had no interest in the labyrinthine worlds she probed daily during her detective work. He looked excitedly towards the surface glitter: the best restaurants, the best areas to live, as though London were a huge Monopoly board. He had always had a divided allegiance to Yorkshire, to their hometown Masham. His father was Yorkshire-born, while his late mother had come from Surrey and had carried with her an air of having gone north on sufferance. She had persistently corrected any Yorkshire turns of speech in Matthew and his sister Kimberley. His carefully neutral accent had been one of the reasons that Robin’s brothers had not been impressed when they had started dating: in spite of her protestations, in spite of his Yorkshire name, they had sensed the wannabe southerner.

“It’d be a strange place to come from, this, wouldn’t it?” said Strike, still looking out over the terraces. “It’s like an island. I’ve never heard that accent before either.”

A man’s voice sounded somewhere nearby, singing a rousing song. Robin thought at first that the tune was a hymn. Then the man’s unique voice was joined by more voices and the breeze changed direction so that they heard a few lines quite distinctly:

“Friends to share in games and laughter
Songs at dusk and books at noon...”

“School song,” said Robin, smiling. She could see them now, a group of middle-aged men in black suits, singing loudly as they walked up Buccleuch Street.

“Funeral,” guessed Strike. “Old schoolmate. Look at them.”

As the black-suited men drew level with the car, one of them spotted Robin looking.