To his sister, Lucy, it would have been almost cruel to let a loved one’s birthday pass without a card, a gift, a phone call or, if she could manage it, a party or at the very least a meal. This was why he usually lied to Lucy, pretending to have plans so as to avoid having to go all the way out to her house in Bromley and participate in a family dinner that she’d enjoy far more than he would. Not long ago, he’d happily have celebrated with a takeaway at his friends Nick and Ilsa’s, but Ilsa had suggested Robin accompany Strike, and as Strike had decided many weeks ago that Ilsa’s increasingly open attempts at matchmaking could only be successfully countered by a blanket refusal to cooperate, he’d pretended that he was going to Lucy’s instead. The one joyless hope Strike had for his thirty-ninth birthday was that Robin would have forgotten it, because, if she did, his own omission would be canceled out: they’d be quits.
He descended the metal stairs to the office on Friday morning and saw, to his surprise, two packages and four envelopes sitting beside the usual pile of mail on Pat’s desk. The envelopes were all of different colors. Apparently, friends and family had decided to make sure birthday greetings reached him in time for the weekend.
“Is it your birthday?” Pat asked in her deep, gravelly voice, still staring at her monitor and typing, electronic cigarette jammed between her teeth as usual.
“Tomorrow,” said Strike, picking up the cards. He recognized the handwriting on three of them, but not the fourth.
“Many happy returns,” grunted Pat, over the clacking of her keyboard. “You should’ve said.”
Some spirit of mischief prompted Strike to ask,
“Why? Would you’ve baked me a cake?”
“No,” said Pat indifferently. “Might’ve got you a card, though.”
“Lucky I didn’t say, then. One fewer tree’s died.”
“It wouldn’t have been a big card,” said Pat, unsmiling, her fingers still flying over the keyboard.
Grinning slightly, Strike removed himself, his cards and packages into the inner office, and later that evening took them upstairs with him, still unopened.
He woke on the twenty-third with his mind full of his trip to Greenwich with Robin later, and only remembered the significance of the day when he saw the presents and cards on the table. The packages contained a sweater from Ted and Joan, and a sweatshirt from Lucy. Ilsa, Dave Polworth and his half-brother Al had all sent joke cards which, while not actually making him laugh, were vaguely cheering.
He slipped the fourth card out of its envelope. It had a photograph of a bloodhound on the front, and Strike considered this for a second or two, wondering why it had been chosen. He’d never owned a dog, and while he had a mild preference for dogs over cats, having worked alongside a few in the military, he wouldn’t have said dog-loving was one of his salient characteristics. Flicking the card open, he saw the words:
Happy birthday Cormoran,
Best,
Jonny (Dad)
For a few moments, Strike merely looked at the words, his mind as blank as the rest of the card. The last time he’d seen his father’s writing, he’d been full of morphine after his leg had been blown off. As a child, he’d occasionally caught a glimpse of his father’s signature on legal documents sent to his mother. Then, he’d stared awestruck at the name, as though he were glimpsing an actual part of his father, as though the ink were blood, and solid proof that his father was a real human being, not a myth.
Quite suddenly, and with a force that shocked Strike, he found himself full of rage, rage on behalf of the small boy who would once have sold his soul to receive a birthday card from his father. He’d grown well beyond any desire to have contact with Jonny Rokeby, but he could still recall the acute pain his father’s continual and implacable absence had so often caused him as a child: while the primary class was making Father’s Day cards, for instance, or when strange adults questioned him about why he never saw Rokeby, or other children jeered at him, singing Deadbeats songs or telling him his mother had got pregnant with him purely to get Rokeby’s money. He remembered the longing that was almost an ache, always most acute around birthdays and Christmas, for his father to send something, or phone: anything, to show that he knew Strike was alive. Strike hated the memory of these fantasies more than he hated remembering the pain caused by their eternal unfulfillment, but most of all he hated remembering the hopeful lies he’d told himself when, as a very young boy, he’d made excuses for his father, who probably didn’t know that the family had moved yet again, who’d sent things to the wrong address, who wanted to know him but simply couldn’t find him.
Where had Rokeby been when his son was a nobody? Where had Rokeby been every time Leda’s life came off the rails, and Ted and Joan rode, again, to the rescue? Where had he been on any of the thousands of occasions when his presence might have meant something real, and genuine, rather than an attempt to look good to the papers?
Rokeby knew literally nothing about his son except that he was a detective, and that explained the fucking bloodhound. Fuck you and fuck your fucking card. Strike tore the card in half, then into quarters, and threw the pieces into the bin. But for a disinclination to trigger the fire alarm, he might have put a match
