Page 392 of The Running Grave

‘Are you all right?’ Robin asked.

‘What?’ said Strike, though he’d heard her. ‘Yeah. I’m fine.’

But in reality, he’d called her into the inner office because he wanted her company as long as he could get it. Robin wondered whether she dared ask, and decided she did.

‘Pat told me you were meeting Charlotte’s sister.’

‘Did she?’ said Strike, though without rancour.

‘Did she ask to see you, or—?’

‘Yeah, she asked to see me,’ said Strike.

There was a short silence.

‘She wanted to meet me right after Charlotte died, but I couldn’t,’ said Strike. ‘Then she closed up shop and went off to the country with her kids for a month.’

‘I’m sorry, Cormoran,’ said Robin quietly.

‘Yeah, well,’ said Strike, with a slight shrug. ‘I gave her what she was after, I think.’

‘What was that?’

‘Dunno,’ said Strike, examining his vape pen. ‘Reassurance nobody could’ve stopped it happening? Except me,’ he added. ‘I could’ve.’

Robin felt desperately sorry for him, and knew it must have shown on her face, because when he glanced up at her he said,

‘I wouldn’t change anything.’

‘Right,’ said Robin, unsure of what else to say.

‘She called here,’ said Strike, dropping his gaze back to the vape pen in his hand, which he was turning over and over. ‘Three times, on the night she did it. I knew who it was and I didn’t answer. Then I listened to the messages and deleted them.’

‘You couldn’t have known—’

‘Yeah, I could,’ said Strike calmly, still turning the vape pen over in his hand, ‘she was a walking suicide even when I met her. She’d already tried a couple of times.’

Robin knew this from her conversations with Ilsa, who scathingly categorised Charlotte’s various suicide attempts into two categories: those meant to manipulate, and those that were genuine. However, Robin could no longer take Ilsa’s estimation at face value. Charlotte’s final attempt had been no empty gesture. She’d been determined to live no longer – unless, it seemed, Strike had answered the phone. The suicide of Carrie Curtis Woods, no matter that Robin now knew she’d been a collaborator in infanticide, would be a scar Robin bore forever. How it felt to know you might have prevented the death of somebody you’d loved for sixteen years, she had no idea.

‘Cormoran, I’m sorry,’ she said again.

‘Feel sorry for Amelia and her kids, not me,’ he said. ‘I was done. There’s nothing deader than dead love.’

For six years now, Robin had longed to know what Strike really felt for Charlotte Campbell, the woman he’d left for good on the very day Robin had arrived at the agency as a temp. Charlotte had been the most intimidating woman Robin had ever met: beautiful, clever, charming and also – Robin had seen evidence of it herself – devious and occasionally callous. Robin had felt guilty about hoarding every crumb of information about Strike and Charlotte’s relationship Ilsa had ever let fall, feeling she was betraying Strike in listening, in remembering. He’d always been so cagey about the relationship, even after some of the barriers between them had come down, even after Strike had openly called Robin his best friend.

Strike, meanwhile, was aware he was breaking a vow he’d made himself six years previously, when, fresh from the rupture with a woman he still loved, he’d noticed how sexy his temp was, almost at the same moment he’d noticed the engagement ring on her finger. He’d resolved then, knowing his own susceptibility, that there would be no easy slide into intimacy with a woman who, but for the engagement ring, he might willingly have rebounded onto. He’d been strict about not letting himself trawl for her sympathy. Even after his love for Charlotte had shrivelled into non-existence, leaving behind it a ghostly husk of pity and exasperation, Strike had maintained this reserve, because, against his will, his feelings for Robin were growing deeper and more complex, and her third finger was bare now, and he’d feared ruining the most important friendship of his life, and trashing the business for which both had sacrificed so much.

But today, with Charlotte dead, and with Robin perhaps destined for another engagement ring, Strike had things to say. Perhaps it was the delusion of the middle-aged male to think it would make any difference, but there came a time when a man needed to take charge of his own fate. So he inhaled nicotine, then said,

‘Last year, Charlotte begged me to get back together. I told her nothing on earth would make me help raise Jago Ross’s kids. This was after we – the agency – found out Jago was knocking his older daughters around. And she said I needn’t worry: it’d be shared custody now. In other words, she’d palm the kids off on him, if I was happy to come back.

‘I’d just handed her all the evidence a judge would need to keep those kids safe, and she told me she’d shunt them off on that bastard, thinking I’d say, “Great. Fuck ’em. Let’s go and get a drink.”’

Strike exhaled nicotine vapour. Robin hadn’t noticed she was holding her breath.

‘Always a bit of delusion in love, isn’t there?’ said Strike, watching the vapour rise to the ceiling. ‘You fill in the blanks with your own imagination. Paint them exactly the way you want them to be. But I’m a detective… some fucking detective. If I’d stuck to hard facts – if I’d done that, even in the first twenty-four hours I knew her – I’d have walked and never looked back.’

‘You were nineteen,’ said Robin. ‘Exactly the same age Will was, when he heard Jonathan Wace speak for the first time.’