Strike opened the book again and continued to read.
9
Faire Sir, of friendship let me now you pray,
That as I late aduentured for your sake,
The hurts whereof me now from battell stay,
Ye will me now with like good turne repay.
Edmund Spenser
The Faerie Queene
George Layborn still hadn’t managed to lay hands on the Bamborough file when Robin’s birthday arrived.
For the first time in her life, she woke on the morning of October the ninth, remembered what day it was and experienced no twinge of excitement, but a lowering sensation. She was twenty-nine years old today, and twenty-nine had an odd ring to it. The number seemed to signify not a landmark, but a staging post: “Next stop: THIRTY.” Lying alone for a few moments in her double bed in her rented bedroom, she remembered what her favorite cousin, Katie, had said during Robin’s last trip home, while Robin had been helping Katie’s two-year-old son make Play-Doh monsters to ride in his Tonka truck.
“It’s like you’re traveling in a different direction to the rest of us.”
Then, seeing something in Robin’s face that made her regret her words, Katie had hastily added,
“I don’t mean it in a bad way! You seem really happy. Free, I mean! Honestly,” Katie had said, with hollow insincerity, “I really envy you sometimes.”
Robin hadn’t known a second’s regret for the termination of a marriage that, in its final phase, had made her deeply unhappy. She could still conjure up the mood, mercifully not experienced since, in which all color seemed drained from her surroundings—and they had been pretty surroundings, too: she knew that the sea captain’s house in Deptford where she and Matthew had finally parted had been a most attractive place, yet it was strange how few details she could remember about it now. All she could recall with any clarity was the deadened mood she’d suffered within those walls, the perpetual feelings of guilt and dread, and the dawning horror which accompanied the realization that she had shackled herself to somebody whom she didn’t like, and with whom she had next to nothing in common.
Nevertheless, Katie’s blithe description of Robin’s current life as “happy” and “free” wasn’t entirely accurate. For several years now, Robin had watched Strike prioritize his working life over everything else—in fact, Joan’s diagnosis had been the first occasion she’d known him to reallocate his jobs, and make something other than detection his top concern—and these days Robin, too, felt herself becoming taken over by the job, which she found satisfying to the point that it became almost all-consuming. Finally living what she’d wanted ever since she first walked through the glass door of Strike’s office, she now understood the potential for loneliness that came with a single, driving passion.
Having sole possession of her bed had been a great pleasure at first: nobody sulking with their back to her, nobody complaining that she wasn’t pulling her weight financially, or droning on about his promotion prospects; nobody demanding sex that had become a chore rather than a pleasure. Nevertheless, while she missed Matthew not at all, she could envisage a time (if she was honest, was perhaps already living it) when the lack of physical contact, of affection and even of sex—which for Robin was a more complicated prospect than for many women—would become, not a boon, but a serious absence in her life.
And then what? Would she become like Strike, with a succession of lovers relegated firmly to second place, after the job? No sooner had she thought this than she found herself wondering, as she’d done almost daily since, whether her partner had called Charlotte Campbell back. Impatient with herself, she threw back the covers and, ignoring the packages lying on top of her chest of drawers, went to take a shower.
Her new home in Finborough Road occupied the top two floors of a terraced house. The bedrooms and bathroom were on the third floor, the public rooms on the fourth. A small terraced area lay off the sitting room, where the owner’s elderly rough-coated dachshund, Wolfgang, liked to lie outside on sunny days.
Robin, who was under no illusions about property available in London for single women on an average wage, especially one with legal bills to pay, considered herself immensely fortunate to be living in a clean, well-maintained and tastefully decorated flat, with a double room to herself and a flatmate she liked. Her live-in landlord was a forty-two-year-old actor called Max Priestwood, who couldn’t afford to run the place without a tenant. Max, who was gay, was what Robin’s mother would have called ruggedly handsome: tall and broad-shouldered, with a full head of thick, dark blond hair and a perpetually weary look about his gray eyes. He was also an old friend of Ilsa’s, who’d been at university with his younger brother.
In spite of Ilsa’s assurances that “Max is absolutely lovely,” Robin had spent the first few months of her tenancy wondering whether she’d made a huge mistake in moving in with him, because he seemed sunk in what seemed perpetual gloom. Robin tried her very best to be a good flatmate: she was naturally tidy, she never played music loudly or cooked anything very smelly; she made a fuss of Wolfgang and remembered to feed him if Max was out; she was punctilious when it came to replacing washing-up liquid and toilet roll; and she made a point of being polite and cheery whenever they came into contact, yet Max rarely if ever smiled, and when she first arrived, he’d seemed to find it an immense effort to talk to her. Feeling paranoid, Robin had wondered at first whether Ilsa had strong-armed Max into accepting her as a tenant.
Conversation had become slightly easier between them over the months of her tenancy,
