“—whose wife just lost their baby! I know—and what the fuck was he doing in the pub with you, leaving her to—”

“She threw him out!” barked Strike. “Did she tell you that, during the Great Sisterhood Grievance Meeting? And I’m not going to apologize for wanting some fucking R&R after the week I’ve just had—”

“—whereas I don’t need R&R, do I? I haven’t forfeited half my annual leave—”

“How many times have I thanked you for covering for me when I’m in Corn—?”

“So what was with you being an arsehole to me this morning, when I was late for the first fucking time ever—”

“I’d had three and a half hours’ sleep—”

“You live over the bloody office!”

“Fuck this,” said Strike, throwing his cigarette down. He began to walk away from her, certain now of the direction to the Tube, thinking of the things he could have said: that it was guilt about the pressure he was putting on Robin that had kept him in London, when he should be in St. Mawes with his dying aunt; Jonny Rokeby on the phone that morning; and Nick’s tears in the pub, and the relief it had been to sit with an old mate and drink, and listen to someone else’s troubles instead of fret about his own.

“And don’t,” bellowed Robin from behind him, “buy me any more fucking flowers!”

“No danger of that!” yelled Strike over his shoulder, as he strode away into the darkness.

42

… his late fight

With Britomart, so sore did him offend,

That ryde he could not, till his hurts he did amend.

Edmund Spenser

The Faerie Queene

When Strike woke on Saturday morning, with a thumping headache and a foul-tasting mouth, it took him a while to piece together exactly what had happened the previous evening. Aside from the memory of vomiting, which he felt he’d done far too much of lately, all he could at first recall were Kyle’s bright red face and Robin’s pinched white one.

But then, slowly, he reconstructed Robin’s complaints: arriving late and drunk, being rude to her brother and upsetting a dinner party by telling a couple of students what he considered home truths about the real world. He also thought there’d been mention of him being insufficiently touchy-feely with staff.

Gingerly, he got out of bed and, with the aid of the furniture, hopped his way to the bathroom and then into the shower.

As Strike washed, two separate impulses did battle within him. One was the urge to self-justify, which patted him on the back and awarded him a win for what he could remember of his argument with the students. The other was an innate honesty about his motives that forced him to recognize that his instant antagonism to Robin’s guests had been rooted in their resemblance to the kinds of people toward whom his mother would have instantly gravitated.

Leda Strike’s whole life had been a battle against constraint of any kind: going for a march in her underwear would have seemed to her just one more fabulous blow against limitations. Strike, who never forgot Leda’s generous heart or her ineradicable love of the underdog, was nevertheless clear-eyed about the fact her activism had mostly taken the form of enthusiastic exhibitionism. Not for Leda the tedious toil of door-to-door canvassing, the difficult business of compromise, or the painstaking work structural change entailed. Never a deep or critical thinker, she’d been a sucker for what Strike thought of as intellectual charlatans. The basis for her life’s philosophy, if such a word could be used for the loose collection of whims and kneejerk reactions she called beliefs, was that everything of which the bourgeoisie disapproved must be good and right. Naturally, she’d have sided with Kyle and Courtney in championing pornography and SlutWalks, and she’d have seen her son’s quibbles as something he must have picked up from her killjoy sister-in-law.

While Strike dried himself and put on his prosthesis, moving cautiously in deference to his throbbing head, the idea of phoning Robin occurred, only to be dismissed. His long-established habit, in the aftermath of a row with a woman, was to wait for her to make the next move, which he considered mere common sense. If she apologized, all well and good; if she wanted further discussion, there was a chance she’d be calmer after a spell of reflection; if she was still angry, it was simply masochistic to volunteer for further grief until she came looking for it. While Strike wasn’t in principle opposed to offering an unsolicited apology in the event that he felt himself to have been in the wrong, in practice his apologies tended to be delivered late, and only when it became clear that resolution would come no other way.

This modus operandi owed much to his experiences with Charlotte. Attempting to make up with Charlotte before every last ounce of her fury had been spent had been like trying to rebuild a house during an earthquake. Sometimes, after he refused to accede to some new demand—usually leaving the army, but sometimes giving up contact with another female friend or refusing to spend money he didn’t have, all of which were seen by Charlotte as proof he didn’t love her—Charlotte would walk out, and only after she came back, by which time Strike might well have met or slept with someone else, would the row be discussed. Their arguments had often lasted a week or more. A couple of times, Strike had returned to postings abroad before anything was resolved.

Yet, as he ate a much-needed bacon roll, drank coffee and downed a couple of Nurofen; after he’d called Ted, heard that Joan was still holding out, and assured him that he and Lucy would be there the following day; while opening a couple of bits of post, and ripping up a large gilt-edged invitation to the Deadbeats’ fiftieth anniversary party in May; while food shopping in the everlasting wind and rain, stocking up for what might be a journey of many hours; while he packed clothes for the trip, spoke to Lucy and checked the weather forecast, his thoughts kept returning to Robin.

Gradually he realized that what was bothering him most was the fact that he’d got used to Robin being on his side, which was one of the main reasons he tended to seek reasons to call her if he was at a loose end or feeling low. Over time, they’d developed a most soothing and satisfying camaraderie, and Strike hadn’t imagined it could be disrupted by what he categorized as a dinner party row.

When his phone rang at four o’clock in the afternoon, he surprised himself by snatching it up in hopes that it was his partner, only to see yet another unknown number. Wondering whether he was about to hear Rokeby again, or some other unknown blood relative, he answered.

“Strike.”

“What?” said a sharp, middle-class female voice.

“Cormoran Strike here. Who’s this?”

“Clare Spencer, the Athorns’ social worker. You left a message for me.”

“Oh, yes,” said Strike, pulling out a kitchen chair and sitting down. “Thanks for getting back to me, Mrs.—er—Ms. Spencer.”

“Mrs.,” she said, sounding very slightly amused. “Can I just ask—are you the Cormoran Strike?”

“I doubt there are many others,” said Strike.

He reached for his cigarettes, then pushed them away again. He really did need to cut down.

“I see,” said Clare Spencer. “Well, it was a bit of a shock to get a message from you. How d’you know the Athorns?”