“I have,” said Hutchins, generally the quietest person in the agency. “It’s about that roll of film you wanted passed to the Met.”

“Oh yeah?” said Strike. “Is there news?”

“My mate rang last night. There’s nothing to be done with it. You won’t get any prosecutions now.”

“Why not?” said Robin.

She sounded angrier than she’d meant to. The men all looked at her.

“Perpetrators’ faces all hidden,” said Hutchins. “That arm that appears for a moment: you can’t build a prosecution case on an out-of-focus ring.”

“I thought your contact said the roll had come out of a raid on one of Mucky Ricci’s brothels?” said Robin.

“He thinks it did,” Hutchins corrected her. “You won’t get DNA evidence off a can that old, that’s been kept in a shed and an attic and handled by a hundred people. It’s a no-go. Shame,” he said indifferently, “but there you are.”

Strike now heard his mobile ringing back on the partners’ desk, where he’d left it. Worried it might be Ted, he excused himself from the meeting and retreated into the inner office, closing the door behind him.

There was no caller ID on the number ringing his mobile.

“Cormoran Strike.”

“Hello, Cormoran,” said an unfamiliar, husky voice. “It’s Jonny.”

There was a brief silence.

“Your father,” Rokeby added.

Strike, whose tired mind was full of Joan, of the agency’s three open cases, of guilt about being grumpy with his partner, and the logistical demands he was placing on his employees by disappearing to Cornwall again, said nothing at all. Through the dividing door, he could hear the team still discussing the roll of film.

“Wanted a chat,” said Rokeby. “Is that all right?”

Strike felt suddenly disembodied; completely detached from everything, from the office, from his fatigue, from the concerns that had seemed all-important just seconds ago. It was as though he and his father’s voice existed alone and nothing else was fully real, except Strike’s adrenaline, and a primal desire to leave a mark that Rokeby wouldn’t quickly forget.

“I’m listening,” he said.

Another silence.

“Look,” said Rokeby, sounding slightly uneasy, “I don’t wanna do this by phone. Let’s meet. It’s been too fucking long. Water under the bridge. Let’s meet, let’s… I wanna—this can’t go on. This fucking—feud, or whatever it is.”

Strike said nothing.

“Come to the house,” said Rokeby. “Come over. Let’s talk, and… you’re not a kid any more. There are two sides to every story. Nothing’s black and white.”

He paused. Strike still said nothing.

“I’m proud of you, d’you know that?” said Rokeby. “I’m really fucking proud of you. What you’ve done and…”

The sentence petered out. Strike stared, motionless, at the blank wall in front of him. Beyond the partition wall, Pat was laughing at something Morris had said.

“Look,” repeated Rokeby, with just a tiny hint of temper now, because he was a man used to getting his own way. “I get it, I do, but what the fuck can I do? I can’t time travel. Al’s told me what you’ve been saying, and there’s a bunch of stuff you don’t know, about your mother and all her fucking men. If you just come over, we can have a drink, we can have it all out. And,” said Rokeby, quietly insinuating, “maybe I can help you out a bit, maybe there’s something you want I can help out with, peace offering, I’m open to suggestions…”

In the outer office, Hutchins and Barclay were taking their leave, ready to get back to their separate jobs. Robin was thinking only about how much she wanted to go home. She was supposed to have the rest of the day off, but Morris was hanging around, and she was sure he was waiting because he wanted to walk with her to the Tube. Pretending to have paperwork to look at, she was rifling through a filing cabinet while Morris and Pat chatted, hoping he’d leave. She’d just opened an old file on a prolific adulterer, when Strike’s voice filled the room from the inner office. She, Pat and Morris turned their heads. Several pages of the file Robin was balancing on top of the drawer slid to the floor.

“… so GO FUCK YOURSELF!”

Before Robin could exchange looks with Morris or Pat, the dividing door between inner and outer offices opened. Strike looked alarming: white, livid, his breath coming fast. He stormed through the outer office, grabbed his coat and could be heard heading down the metal staircase outside.

Robin picked up the fallen pages.

“Shit,” said Morris, grinning. “Wouldn’t have wanted to be on the end of that call.”

“Nasty temper,” said Pat, who looked weirdly satisfied. “Knew it, the moment I laid eyes on him.”

40

Thus as they words amongst them multiply,

They fall to strokes, the frute of too much talke…

Edmund Spenser

The Faerie Queene

Robin found no polite way of avoiding walking to the Tube with Morris and in consequence was obliged to listen to two off-color jokes, and to lie about her Valentine’s plans, because she could just imagine Morris’s response if she told him Strike was coming over. Pretending that she hadn’t heard or registered Morris’s suggestion that they should get together one night to compare notes on lawyers, she parted from him at the bottom of the escalator with relief.

Tired and mildly depressed, Robin’s thoughts lingered on Morris as the Tube sped her back toward Earl’s Court. Was he so used to women responding readily to his undeniable handsomeness that he took it for granted he was eliciting a positive response? Or did the fault lie in Robin herself, who, for the sake of politeness, for the cohesion of the team, because she didn’t want to make trouble when the agency was so busy, continued to smile at his stupid jokes and chose not to say, loudly and clearly, “I don’t like you. We’re never going to date.”

She arrived home to find the flat full of the cheering and delicious smell of simmering beef and red wine. Max appeared to have gone out, but a casserole was sitting in the oven and Wolfgang was lying as close to the hot door as he could manage without burning himself, reminding Robin of fans who camped out overnight in hope of catching a glimpse of pop stars.

Instead of lying down on her bed and trying to get a few hours’ sleep before dinner, Robin, who’d been stung by Strike’s reminders that she hadn’t chased up Amanda Laws or found Paul Satchwell, made herself more coffee, opened her laptop and sat down at the small dining table. After sending Amanda Laws another email, she opened Google. When she did so, each letter of the logo turned one by one into a pastel-colored, heart-shaped candy with a slogan on it: MR. RIGHT, PUPPY LUV and BLIND DATE, and for some reason, her thoughts moved to Charlotte Campbell. It would, of course, be very difficult for a married woman to meet her lover tonight. And who, she wondered, had Strike been telling to fuck off over the phone?

Robin set to work on Satchwell, trying to emulate Strike’s success in finding C. B. Oakden. She played around with Satchwell’s three names, reversing Paul and Leonard, trying initials and deliberate misspellings, but the men who appeared in answer to her searches didn’t look promising.