Helen Wardrop, the woman in question, had told her story in a television documentary about Creed, which Strike had watched on YouTube a few nights previously while eating a Chinese takeaway. The program had been salacious and melodramatic, with many poorly acted reconstructions and music lifted from a seventies horror movie. At the time of filming, Helen Wardrop had been a slack-faced, slow-spoken woman with dyed red hair and badly applied fake eyelashes, whose glazed affect and monotone suggested either tranquilizers or neurological damage. Creed had struck the drunk and screaming Helen what might have been a fatal blow to the head with a hammer in the course of trying to force her into the back of his van. She turned her head obligingly for the interviewer, to show the viewers a still-depressed area of skull. The interviewer told her she must feel very lucky to have survived. There was a tiny hesitation before she agreed with him.
Strike had turned off the documentary at that point, frustrated by the banality of the questioning. He, too, had once been in the wrong place at the wrong time, and bore the lifelong consequences, so he perfectly understood Helen Wardrop’s hesitation. In the immediate aftermath of the explosion that had taken Strike’s foot and shin, not to mention the lower half of Sergeant Gary Topley’s body and a chunk of Richard Anstis’s face, Strike had felt a variety of emotions which included guilt, gratitude, confusion, fear, rage, resentment and loneliness, but he couldn’t remember feeling lucky. “Lucky” would have been the bomb not detonating. “Lucky” would have meant still having both his legs. “Lucky” was what people who couldn’t bear to contemplate horrors needed to hear maimed and terrorized survivors call themselves. He recalled his aunt’s tearful assertion that he wasn’t in pain as he lay in his hospital bed, groggy with morphine, her words standing in stark contrast to the first Polworth had spoken to him, when he visited Strike in Selly Oak Hospital.
“Bit of a fucker, this, Diddy.”
“It is, a bit,” Strike had said, his amputated leg stretched in front of him, nerve endings insisting that the calf and foot were still there.
Strike arrived at Amersham station to discover he’d just missed a train back to London. He therefore sat down on a bench outside in the feeble autumn sunshine of late afternoon, took out his cigarettes, lit one, then examined his phone. Two texts and a missed call had come in while he’d been interviewing Gupta, his mobile on mute.
The texts were from his half-brother Al and his friend Ilsa, and could therefore wait, whereas the missed call was from George Layborn, whom he immediately phoned back.
“That you, Strike?”
“Yeah. You just phoned me.”
“I did. I’ve got it for you. Copy of the Bamborough file.”
“You’re kidding!” said Strike, exhaling on a rush of exhilaration. “George, that’s phenomenal, I owe you big time for this.”
“Buy me a pint and mention me to the press if you ever find out who did it. ‘Valuable assistance.’ ‘Couldn’t have done it without him.’ We can decide the wording after. Might remind this lot I deserve promotion. Listen,” added Layborn, more seriously, “it’s a mess. The file. Real mess.”
“In what way?”
“Old. Bits missing, from what I’ve seen, though they might just be in the wrong order—I haven’t had time to go systematically through the whole thing, there’s four boxes’ worth here—but Talbot’s record-keeping was all over the place and Lawson coming in and trying to make sense of it hasn’t really helped. Anyway, for what it’s worth, it’s yours. I’ll be over your way tomorrow and drop it in at the office, shall I?”
“Can’t tell you how much I appreciate this, George.”
“My old man would’ve been dead happy to know someone was going to take another look,” said Layborn. “He’d’ve loved to see Creed nailed for another one.”
Layborn rang off and Strike immediately lit a cigarette and called Robin to give her the good news, but his call went straight to voicemail. Then he remembered that she was in a meeting with the persecuted weatherman, so he turned his attention to the text from Al.
Hey bruv, it began, chummily.
Al was the only sibling on his father’s side with whom Strike maintained any kind of ongoing relationship, spasmodic and one-sided though it was, Al making all the running. Strike had a total of six Rokeby half-siblings, three of whom he’d never even met, a situation which he felt no need to remedy, finding the stresses of his known relatives quite sufficient to be going on with.
As you know, the Deadbeats are celebrating 50 years together next year—
Strike hadn’t known this. He’d met his father, Jonny Rokeby, who was lead singer of the Deadbeats, exactly twice in his life and most of the information he had about his rock-star father had come either from his mother Leda, the woman with whom he had carelessly fathered a child in the semi-public corner of a party in New York, or from the press.
As you know, the Deadbeats are celebrating 50 years together next year and (super confidential) they’re going to drop a surprise new album on 24th May. We (families) are throwing them a big London bash that night at Spencer House to celebrate the launch. Bruv, it would mean the world to all of us, especially Dad, if you came. Gaby’s had the idea of getting a picture taken of all the kids together, to give him as a present on the night. First ever. Getting it framed, as a surprise. Everyone’s in. We just need you. Think about it, bruv.
Strike read this text through twice, then closed it without replying and opened Ilsa’s, which was far shorter.
It’s Robin’s birthday, you total dickhead.
12
With flattering wordes he sweetly wooed her,
And offered
