Page 106 of Troubled Blood

Till that through weakness he was forced at last

To yield himself unto the mighty ill,

Which, as a victor proud, ’gan ransack fast

His inward parts and all his entrails waste…

Edmund Spenser

The Faerie Queene

With three days to go before Christmas, Strike was forced to abandon the pretense that he didn’t have flu. Concluding that the only sensible course was to hole up in his attic flat while the virus passed through his system, he took himself to a packed Sainsbury’s where, feverish, sweating, breathing through his mouth and desperate to get away from the crowds and the canned carols, he grabbed enough food for a few days, and bore it back to his two rooms above the office.

Joan took the news that he wouldn’t be joining the festivities in Cornwall predictably hard. She went so far as to suggest that it would be fine for him to come, as long as they sat at opposite ends of the dinner table, but to Strike’s relief, Ted overruled her. Strike didn’t know whether he was being paranoid, but he suspected Lucy didn’t believe he was genuinely ill. If she did, her tone suggested that he might have caught flu deliberately. He thought he heard a trace of accusation when she informed him that Joan was now entirely bald.

By five o’clock in the afternoon of Christmas Eve, Strike had developed a cough that made his lungs rattle and his ribs ache. Drowsing on his bed in a T-shirt and boxer shorts, his prosthetic leg propped against a wall, he was woken abruptly by a loud noise. Footsteps seemed to be moving down the stairs, away from his attic door. A paroxysm of coughing seized him before he could call out to the person he thought had woken him. Struggling back into a sitting position to clear his lungs, he didn’t hear the second approach of footsteps until somebody knocked on his door. He greatly resented the effort it took to shout, “What?”

“D’you need anything?” came Pat’s deep, gravelly voice.

“No,” Strike shouted. The syllable emerged as a croak.

“Have you got food?”

“Yes.”

“Painkillers?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I’m leaving some things outside the door for you.” He heard her setting objects down. “There are a couple of presents. Eat the soup while it’s still hot. See you on the twenty-eighth.”

Her footsteps were clanging down the metal stairs before he could respond.

He wasn’t sure whether he’d imagined the mention of hot soup, but the possibility was enough to make him drag his crutches toward himself and make his way laboriously to the door. The chill of the stairwell added gooseflesh to his fever sweats. Pat had somehow managed to carry the old video projector upstairs for him, and he suspected that it was the sound of her setting this down that had woken him. Beside it lay the can of film from Gregory Talbot’s attic, a small pile of wrapped Christmas gifts, a handful of cards and two polystyrene tubs of hot chicken soup that he knew she must have walked to Chinatown to fetch. He felt quite pathetically grateful.

Leaving the heavy projector and the can of film where they were, he pulled and prodded the Christmas gifts and card across the floor into the flat with one of his crutches, then slowly bent down to pick up the tubs of soup.

Before eating, he took his mobile from the bedside table and texted Pat:

Thanks very much. Hope you have a good Christmas.

He then wrapped the duvet around himself and ate the soup straight out of the tubs, tasting nothing. He’d hoped the hot liquid would soothe his raw throat, but the cough persisted, and once or twice he thought he was going to choke everything back up again. His intestines also seemed unsure whether they welcomed food. Having finished the two tubs, he settled back down beneath the duvet, sweating while he looked at the black sky outside, guts churning, and wondering why he wasn’t yet on the mend.

After a night of intermittent dozing interrupted by prolonged coughing fits, Strike woke on Christmas morning to find his fever unabated, and sweaty sheets tangled about him. His normally noisy flat was unnaturally quiet. Tottenham Court Road was suddenly, weirdly devoid of traffic. He supposed most of the taxi drivers were at home with their families.

Strike was not a self-pitying man, but lying alone in bed, coughing and sweating, his ribs sore and his fridge now virtually empty, he was unable to prevent his thoughts roaming back over Christmases past, especially those spent at Ted and Joan’s in St. Mawes, where everything proceeded as it did on the television and in story books, with turkey and crackers and stockings.

Of course, today was far from the first Christmas he’d spent away from family and friends. There’d been a couple such in the army, when he’d eaten foil trays of tasteless turkey in field canteens, among camouflage-wearing colleagues wearing Santa hats. The structure he’d enjoyed in the military had then consoled him in the absence of other pleasures, but there was no camaraderie to sustain him today, only the dismal fact that he was alone, ill and one-legged, stuck up in a drafty attic, forced to endure the consequences of his own firm repudiation of any relationship that might offer support in moments of illness or sadness.

The memory of Pat’s kindness became, this Christmas morning, still more touching in retrospect. Turning his head, he saw the few gifts that she’d brought upstairs still lying on the floor just inside the door.

He got up from his bed, still coughing, reached for his crutches and swung himself toward the bathroom. His urine was dark, his unshaven face in the mirror ashen. Though dismayed by his own debility and exhaustion, habits ingrained in him by the military prevented Strike from returning to bed. He knew that lying unwashed with his leg off would merely increase his hovering feeling of depression. He therefore showered, moving more carefully than usual to guard against the risk of falls, dried himself off, put on a clean T-shirt, boxers and dressing gown and, still racked with coughs, prepared himself a tasteless breakfast of porridge made with water, because he preferred to conserve his last pint of milk for his tea. As he’d expected to be well on the mend by now, his stocks of food had dwindled to some limp vegetables, a couple of bits of uncooked chicken two days out of date and a small chunk of hard Cheddar.

After breakfast Strike took painkillers, put on his prosthesis and then, determined to use what small amount of physical strength he could muster before the illness dragged him under again, stripped and remade his bed with clean sheets, removed his Christmas presents from the floor to his kitchen table, and carried the projector and roll of film inside from the landing where he had left them. The can, as he’d expected, bore the mark of Capricorn upon it, drawn in faded but clearly legible marker pen.

His mobile buzzed as he propped the can against the wall beneath his kitchen window. He picked it up, expecting a text from Lucy asking when he was going to call and wish everyone in St. Mawes a Merry Christmas.

Merry Christmas, Bluey. Are you happy? Are you with someone you love?