“—drop a word in a friendly journalist’s ear, to the effect that your long career of screwing over old ladies started with a good hard push in the small of your grandmother’s back? Oh yeah, I definitely can.”

“Now you wait a fucking—”

“I know you think it’s me being set up tonight,” said Strike, leaning in. His body language was unmistakeably menacing, and out of the corner of her eye, Robin saw the black-haired woman in the cheongsam and her partner watching warily, both with their drinks at their lips. “But the police have still got a note written to them in 1985, telling them to dig beneath the cross of St. John. DNA techniques have moved on a lot since then. I expect they’ll be able to get a good match from the saliva under the envelope flap.”

Oakden’s eyelid twitched again.

“You thought you were going to stir up a bit of press interest in the Bamborough case, to get people interested in your shitty book, didn’t you?”

“I never—”

“I’m warning you. You go talking to the papers about me and my father, or about me working the Bamborough case, and I’ll make sure you get nailed for that note. And if by chance that doesn’t work, I’ll put my whole agency onto turning over every part of your miserable fucking life, until I’ve got something else on you to take to the police. Understand?”

Oakden, who looked momentarily unnerved, recovered himself quickly. He even managed another little laugh.

“You can’t stop me writing about whatever I want. That’s freedom of—”

“I’m warning you,” repeated Strike, a little more loudly, “what’ll happen if you get in the way of this case. And you can pay for your own fucking sandwich.”

Strike stood up and Robin, caught off guard, hastened to grab her raincoat and get up, too.

“Cormoran, let’s go out the back,” she said, thinking of the two photographers lurking at the front of the building, but they hadn’t gone more than two steps when they heard Oakden call after them.

“You think I’m scared of your fucking agency? Some fucking detective you are!” he said, and now most of the heads in their vicinity turned. Glancing back, Robin saw that Oakden had got up, too: he’d come out from behind the table and was planted in the middle of the bar, clearly set on making a scene.

“Strike, please, let’s just go,” said Robin, who now had a presentiment of real trouble. Oakden was clearly determined to come out of the encounter with something sellable, or at the very least, a narrative in which he’d come out on top. But Strike had already turned back toward their interviewee.

“You didn’t even know your own fucking father’s having a party round the corner,” said Oakden loudly, pointing in the direction of Spencer House. “Not going to pop in, thank him for fucking your mother on a pile of beanbags while fifty people watched?”

Robin watched what she had dreaded unfold in apparent slow motion: Strike lunged for Oakden. She made a grab for the arm Strike had drawn back for a punch, but too late: his elbow slammed into Robin’s forehead, breaking her glasses in two. Dark spots popped in front of Robin’s eyes and the next thing she knew, she’d fallen backward onto the floor.

Robin’s attempted intervention had given the con man a few seconds in which to dodge, and instead of receiving what might have been a knockout punch, he suffered no worse than a glancing blow to the ear. Meanwhile the enraged Strike, who’d barely registered his arm being impeded, realized what he’d done only when he saw drinkers all over the bar jumping to their feet, their eyes on the floor behind him. Turning, he saw Robin lying there, her hands over her face, a trickle of blood issuing from her nose.

“Shit!” Strike bellowed.

The young barman had run out from behind the bar. Oakden was shouting something about assault. Still slightly dizzy, tears of pain streaming from her eyes, the humiliated Robin was assisted back onto her feet by a couple of affluent-looking gray-haired Americans, who were fussing about getting her a doctor.

“I’m absolutely fine,” she heard herself saying. She’d taken the full force of Strike’s elbow between her eyebrows, and she realized her nose was bleeding only when she accidentally sprayed blood onto the kind American’s white shirt front.

“Robin, shit—” Strike was saying.

“Sir, I’m going to have to—”

“Yes, we’re absolutely going to leave,” Robin told the waiter, absurdly polite, while her eyes watered and she tried to stem the bleeding from her nostrils. “I just need—oh, thank you so much,” she said to the American woman, who’d handed Robin her raincoat.

“Call the police!” Oakden was shouting. Thanks to Robin’s intervention, he was entirely unmarked. “Someone call the bloody police!”

“I won’t be pressing charges,” Robin said to nobody in particular.

“Robin—I’m so—”

Grabbing a handful of Strike’s sleeve, warm blood still trickling down onto her chin, Robin muttered,

“Let’s just go.”

She trod on the cracked lens of her glasses as they headed out of the silent bar, the drinkers staring after them.

58

His louely words her seemd due recompence

Of all her passed paines: one louing howre

For many yeares of sorrow can dispence:

A dram of sweete is worth a pound of sowre:

Shee has forgott, how many, a woeful stowre

For him she late endurd; she speakes no more

Of past…

Before her stands her knight, for whom she toyld so sore.

Edmund Spenser

The Faerie Queene

“Robin—”

“Don’t tell me I shouldn’t have tried to stop you,” she said through gritted teeth, as they hurried through the outside courtyard. Her vision was blurred with tears of pain. Smokers turned to gape as she passed, trying to staunch her bleeding nose. “If that punch had connected, we’d be back there waiting for the police.”

To Robin’s relief, there were no paparazzi waiting for them as they headed into Green Park, but she was scared that it wouldn’t take long, after the scene Strike had just made, for them to come hunting again.

“We’ll get a cab,” said Strike, who was currently consumed with a mixture of total mortification and rage against Oakden, his father, the press and himself. “Listen, you’re right—”

“I know I’m right, thanks!” she said, a little wildly.

Not only was her face throbbing, she was now wondering why Strike hadn’t warned her about Rokeby’s party; why, in fact, he’d let himself get lured there by a second-rate chancer like Oakden, careless of consequences for their case and for the agency.

“TAXI!” bellowed Strike, so loudly that Robin jumped. Somewhere nearby, she heard running footsteps.

A black cab pulled up and Strike pushed Robin inside.

“Denmark Street,” he yelled at the cabbie, and Robin heard the shouts of photographers as the taxi sped up again.

“It’s all right,” said Strike, twisting to look out of the back window, “they’re on foot. Robin… I’m so fucking sorry.”