Career of Evil

“She was seeing a male counselor, a skinny black guy in his fifties who was visiting family in Bristol on the weekend she died, and there’s a church youth group leader called Darrell,” said Wardle, “fat guy in dungarees. He cried his eyes out all through the interview. He was present and correct at the church on the Sunday; nothing checkable otherwise, but I can’t see him wielding a cleaver. That’s everyone we know about. Her course is nearly all girls.”

“No boys in the church youth group?”

“They’re nearly all girls as well. Oldest boy’s fourteen.”

“How would the police feel about me seeing Hazel?” Strike asked.

“We can’t stop you,” Wardle said, shrugging. “I’m for it, on the understanding that you’ll pass on anything useful, but I doubt there’s anything else there. We’ve interviewed everyone, we’ve been through Kelsey’s room, we’ve got her laptop and personally I’d bet none of the people we’ve talked to knew anything. They all thought she was off on a college placement.”

After thanks for the coffee and a particularly warm smile for Robin, which was barely returned, Wardle left.

“Not a word about Brockbank, Laing or Whittaker,” Strike grumbled as Wardle’s clanging footsteps faded from earshot. “And you never told me you’d been ferreting around on the net,” he added to Robin.

“I had no proof she was the girl who’d written the letter,” said Robin, “but I did think Kelsey might have gone online looking for help.”

Strike heaved himself to his feet, took her mug from her desk and was heading for the door when Robin said indignantly:

“Aren’t you interested in what I was going to tell you?”

He turned, surprised.

“That wasn’t it?”

“No!”

“Well?”

“I think I’ve found Donald Laing.”

Strike said nothing at all, but stood looking blank, a mug in each hand.

“You’ve — what? How?”

Robin turned on her computer, beckoned Strike over and began typing. He moved around to look over her shoulder.

“First,” she said, “I had to find out how to spell psoriatic arthritis. Then... look at this.”

She had brought up a JustGiving charity page. A man glared out of the small picture at the top.

“Bloody hell, that’s him!” said Strike, so loudly that Robin jumped. He set the mugs down and dragged his chair around the desk to look at the monitor. In doing so, he knocked over Robin’s roses.

“Shit — sorry—”

“I don’t care,” said Robin. “Sit here, I’ll clear them up.”

She moved out of the way and Strike took her place on the swivel chair.

It was a small photograph, which Strike enlarged by clicking on it. The Scot was standing on what seemed to be a cramped balcony with a balustrade of thick, greenish glass, unsmiling, with a crutch under his right arm. The short, bristly hair still grew low on his forehead, but it seemed to have darkened over the years, no longer red as a fox’s pelt. Clean-shaven, his skin looked pockmarked. He was less swollen in the face than he had been in Lorraine’s picture, but he had put on weight since the days when he had been muscled like a marble Atlas and had bitten Strike on the face in the boxing ring. He was wearing a yellow T-shirt and on his right forearm was the rose tattoo, which had undergone a modification: a dagger now ran through it, and drops of blood fell out of the flower towards the wrist. Behind Laing on his balcony was what looked like a blurry, jagged pattern of windows in black and silver.

He had used his real name:

Donald Laing Charity Appeal

I am a British veteran now suffering from psoriatic arthritis. I am raising money for Arthritis Research. Please give what you can.

The page had been created three months previously. He had raised 0 percent of the one thousand pounds he was hoping to meet.

“No rubbish about doing anything for the money,” Strike noted. “Just ‘gimme.’”

“Not give me,” Robin corrected him from the floor, where she was mopping up spilled flower water with bits of kitchen roll. “He’s giving it to the charity.”

“So he says.”

Strike was squinting at the jagged pattern behind Laing on the balcony.

“Does that remind you of anything? Those windows behind him?”

“I thought of the Gherkin at first,” said Robin, throwing the sodden towels in the bin and getting to her feet, “but the pattern’s different.”

“Nothing about where he’s living,” said Strike, clicking everywhere he could on the page to see what further information he might uncover. “JustGiving must have his details somewhere.”

“You somehow never expect evil people to get ill,” said Robin.

She checked her watch.

“I’m supposed to be on Platinum in fifteen. I’d better get going.”

“Yeah,” said Strike, still staring at Laing’s picture. “Keep in touch and — oh yeah: I need you to do something.”

He pulled his mobile out of his pocket.

“Brockbank.”

“So you do still think it might be him?” Robin said, pausing in the act of putting on her jacket.