Page 194 of The Running Grave

Came up that cold sea at Cromer like a running grave…

Strike gazed out at the measureless mass of water, wondering whether what remained of Daiyu was somewhere out there, her bones long since picked clean, entangled in a broken fishing net, perhaps, her skull rolling gently on the sea bed as the waves tumbled far above. In which case, ‘I could have stopped it’ meant ‘I could have stopped her demanding to go to the sea’ or ‘I could have stopped doing everything she told me to do’.

Come off it.

All right, he argued with himself, where’s the evidence it wasn’t a coincidence?

The common denominator. Jonathan Wace.

That’s not evidence. That’s part of the coincidence.

After all, if Wace had planned his stepdaughter’s murder to get his hands on the quarter of a million pounds Daiyu was worth dead, why instruct Cherie to take her to precisely the same spot where his first wife had lost her life?

Because murderers tended to be creatures of habit? Because, having successfully murdered once, they stuck to the same modus operandi ever after? Might Wace have been planning a brazen double bluff to the police? ‘If I was going to drown her, why would I do it there?’ Could Wace have been hubristic enough to believe he could charm everyone into believing it was all a ghastly twist of fate?

Except that there was a problem with this theory, too: the death of the first Mrs Wace really had been an accident. George’s testimony corroborated Abigail’s: Wace hadn’t been in the water when his wife drowned, and had tried his utmost to save her. Unless… watching the waves break on the flints below, Strike wondered whether it was possible to induce an epileptic fit in somebody. He tugged his notebook out of his pocket and wrote a reminder to himself to look into this. He then looked back out to sea, postponing the moment when he’d have to walk again, and thinking about Cherie Gittins.

The girl who’d so foolishly driven her larcenous, knife-toting boyfriend to the pharmacy by daylight a few short years later, and who’d been loose-lipped enough to blurt out ‘I could have stopped it’ to Leonard Heaton outside the coroner’s court, was no mastermind. No, if Daiyu’s disappearance had been planned, Strike was certain Cherie had been a tool, rather than the architect of the plot.

His stomach rumbled loudly. He was tired, hungry and his leg was still aching. The last thing he felt like doing was driving back to London this evening. Turning reluctantly away from the sea, he retraced his steps, registering the presence of an enormous and fairly ugly redbrick hotel facing the pier as he turned back into Garden Street. The temptation of checking in was increased by the sight of the King’s Head pub, which had a paved beer garden, tucked up the High Street to his left. The rear entrance to the redbrick Hotel de Paris (why Paris?) lay directly opposite the beer garden, beckoning invitingly.

Fuck it.

He’d explain the overnight stay to the agency’s pernickety accountant by claiming to have been detained by his investigation. Inside the King’s Head, he glanced at a menu on the bar before ordering a pint of Doom Bar and a burger and chips, justifying the latter by the seven preceding days of good dietary behaviour.

The damp beer garden was deserted, which suited Strike, because he wanted to concentrate. Once settled at a table with his vape pen, he took out his mobile and got back to work. Having looked up lidos in the vicinity of Cherie’s childhood home, he found one in Herne Hill. Not forgetting that her youthful swimming career would have happened under her birth name of Carine Makepeace, Strike kept Googling, and at last, on page four of his search results, he found what he was looking for: an old photo of a swimming team comprising both boys and girls, posted to the Facebook page of a woman called Sarah-Jane Barnett.

There in the middle of the picture was a girl of eleven or twelve, in whose plump face Strike recognised the simpering smile of the teenager later known as Cherie Gittins. Beneath the picture, Sarah-Jane had written:

Happy memories of the old Brockwell Lido! Oh, to be that fit again, but it was easier when I was 12! L-R John Curtis (who we all fancied!!!), Tamzin Couch, Stuart Whitely, Carrie Makepeace, yours truly, Kellie Powers and Reece Summers.

Strike now pulled up the Facebook page of Carrie Curtis Woods, who still hadn’t accepted his follower request. However, he now knew that Cherie had once gone by Carrie too, and better even than that, he had a reason she might have chosen the pseudonym ‘Curtis’: in tribute to a childhood crush.

Having finished his burger, chips and pint, Strike returned to the car park to pick up a small rucksack containing toothbrush, toothpaste, clean underwear and a recharging lead for his phone, which he kept in the boot of his car for unforeseen overnight stays, then walked back to the Hotel de Paris.

He could have predicted the interior from the exterior: there was grandeur in the high archways, crystal chandeliers and sweeping staircase of the lobby, but a whiff of the youth hostel about the cork noticeboard on which a laminated history of the hotel had been printed. Incapable as ever of leaving a question unanswered, Strike cast an eye over this, and learned that the hotel had been established by a man whose family had fled France during the revolution.

As he’d hoped, he was able to secure a single room, and as he supposed was inevitable in the summer season, it didn’t have a sea view, but looked out over the rooftops of Cromer. Consciously looking for the good, he noted that the room was clean and the bed seemed comfortable, but now that he was shut inside it, surrounded by the same soft yellow and red colour scheme as the lobby, he felt claustrophobic, which he knew to be entirely irrational. Between his childhood and the army, he’d slept in cars, tents pitched on hard ground, squats, that bloody awful barn at Chapman Farm and a multi-storey car park in Angola: he had no reason to complain of a perfectly adequate hotel room.

But as he hung up his jacket and glanced around to determine how many balancing aids were available between the bed and the ensuite bathroom, which he’d need to navigate one-legged next morning, the depression he’d been fighting off all day sagged down upon him. Letting himself drop down onto the bed, he passed a hand over his face, unable to distract himself any longer from the twin causes of his low mood: Charlotte and Robin.

Strike despised self-pity. He’d witnessed serious poverty, trauma and hardship, both in the military and during his detective career, and he believed in counting your blessings. Nevertheless, Charlotte’s midnight threats were gnawing at him. If she followed through on them, the consequences wouldn’t be pretty. He’d had enough press interest to know how severe a threat it posed to his business, and he was already dealing with an attempt at sabotage from Patterson. He’d hoped never to have to decamp from his office again, or to lose clients who needed an anonymous sleuth, not an unwilling celebrity, least of all one tarred with the suspicion of violence against a woman.

He took out his phone again and Googled his name and Charlotte’s.

There were a few hits, mostly old newspaper articles in which their relationship had been mentioned in passing, including the recent one about her assault on Landon Dormer. So she hadn’t talked, yet. Doubtless he’d know about it immediately if she did: helpful friends would text him their outrage, as people always did on reading bad news, thinking this would help.

He yawned, plugged the mobile in to charge and, even though it was still early, went to shower before turning in. He’d hoped the hot water would improve his mood, but as he soaped himself, he found his thoughts drifting towards Robin, which brought no consolation. He’d been with her on his last two visits to seaside towns, both taken in the course of other cases: he’d eaten chips with her in Skegness, and stayed overnight in neighbouring rooms in Whitstable.

He remembered particularly the hotel dinner they’d shared that evening, shortly after he’d just broken up with his last girlfriend, and before Robin had gone on her first date with Ryan Murphy. Robin, he remembered, had been wearing a blue shirt. They’d drunk Rioja and laughed together, and waiting upstairs had been those two bedrooms, side by side on the top floor. Everything, he thought, had been propitious: wine, sea view, both of them single, nobody else around to interrupt, and what had he done? Nothing. Even telling her that his relationship – short, unsatisfactory and undertaken purely to distract himself from inconvenient desire for his partner – was over might have precipitated a conversation that would have drawn out Robin’s own feelings, but instead he’d maintained his habitual reserve, determined not to mess up their friendship and business partnership, but afraid, too, of rejection. His one, admittedly aborted, drunken move to kiss Robin, outside the Ritz Hotel on her thirtieth, had been met with such a look of horror that it remained branded on his memory.

Naked, he returned to the bedroom to take off his prosthesis. As it parted unwillingly with the gel pad at the end of his stump, he listened to the seagulls wheeling overhead in the sunset and wished to God he’d said something that night in Whitstable, because if he had, he might not currently be feeling so bloody miserable, and resting all his hopes on Ryan Murphy succumbing to one more alcoholic drink.

64

Nine in the third place…

Darkening of the light during the hunt in the south…