Page 15 of The Running Grave

‘Yeah? What colour have you decided on?’

‘Don’t know,’ said Robin. ‘I’ve only just sat down.’

‘OK, well, I was also going to ask whether you could come over to Prudence’s tomorrow evening. She’s happy to lend you some clothes.’

Unless Murphy’s got tickets for the fucking opera, of course.

‘That’d be great,’ said Robin. ‘Where does she live?’

‘Strawberry Hill. I’ll text you the address. We’ll have to meet there, I’m tailing Bigfoot until five.’

This plan agreed, Strike hung up and sat scowling, while taking deep drags on his vape. The idea of Murphy buying theatre tickets aggravated him; it suggested a dangerous degree of effort. Eight months into the relationship, the policeman should surely have stopped pretending he’d rather watch a play than have a decent meal followed by sex. Pushing himself up from the partners’ desk, Strike moved into the outer room, where the office manager, Pat, was typing away at her desk. Evidently she’d heard part of his conversation with Robin through the open door, because she asked, electronic cigarette clamped, as usual, between her teeth,

‘Why d’you call him Bigfoot?’

‘Because he looks like Bigfoot,’ said Strike, as he filled the kettle.

The man in question was the wealthy owner of a software company, whose wife believed him to be visiting sex workers. Having been forced to share a crowded lift with him during his last bout of surveillance, Strike could testify to the fact that the target was not only extremely tall, hairy and unkempt, but smelled as though his last shower was a distant memory.

‘Funny how beards come and go,’ said Pat, still typing.

‘It’s called shaving,’ said Strike, reaching for mugs.

‘Ha ha,’ said Pat. ‘I mean fashions. Sideburns and that.’

An unwelcome memory of Malcolm Crowther sitting by the campfire at Forgeman Farm surfaced in Strike’s mind: Crowther had a small girl and was encouraging her to stroke his handlebar moustache.

‘Want a cup of tea?’ Strike said, dismissing the mental image.

‘Go on, then,’ Pat replied, in the deep, gravelly voice that often caused callers to mistake her for Strike. ‘That Hargreaves woman still hasn’t paid her invoice, by the way.’

‘Call her,’ said Strike, ‘and tell her we need her to settle up by the end of the month.’

‘That’s Monday.’

‘And she’s got millions.’

‘Richer they are, slower they pay.’

‘Some truth in that,’ admitted Strike, setting down Pat’s mug on her desk before returning to the inner office and closing the door.

He spent the next three hours trying to track down the absent father of Shanker’s common-law stepdaughter. The man had had multiple addresses over the past five years, but Strike’s research finally led him to conclude the man was now going by his middle name, probably to avoid being tracked down for child maintenance, and living in Hackney. If he was indeed the right person, he was working as a long-distance haulage driver, which doubtless suited a man keen to evade his parental responsibilities.

Having sent subcontractor Dev Shah an email asking him to put the Hackney address under surveillance and take pictures of whoever entered or left it, Strike set off for dinner with Eric Wardle.

Strike had decided a standard, cheap curry house wouldn’t be sufficient to soften up his policeman friend, from whom he intended to ask a census-related favour. He’d therefore booked a table at the Cinnamon Club, which lay a short taxi ride away.

The restaurant had once been the Westminster Library, so its many white-tableclothed tables stood in a large, airy room with book-lined walls. Strike, who was first to arrive, removed his suit jacket, loosened his tie, ordered a pint and sat down to read the day’s news off his phone. He realised Wardle had arrived only when the policeman’s shadow fell over the table.

‘Bit of a step up from the Bombay Balti,’ commented the policeman, as he sat down opposite Strike.

‘Yeah, well, business has been good lately,’ said the latter, slipping his phone back into his pocket. ‘How’re you doing?’

‘Can’t complain,’ said Wardle.

When they’d first met, Strike’s friend Eric Wardle had been boyishly handsome. Though still good looking, his once full head of hair was receding, and he looked as though he’d aged by more than the six years that had actually passed. Strike knew it wasn’t only hard work that had etched those grooves around Wardle’s mouth and eyes; he’d lost a brother, and his wife, April, had left him six months previously, taking their three-month-old baby with her.

Talk ran along conventional lines while both perused the menu, and only once the waiter had brought Wardle a pint and taken their order did the policeman hand a folder across the table.