Page 115 of Troubled Blood

What was it about her that made men demand that she keep their dirty secrets?

“I won’t tell Strike,” she said, shaking more with rage than with cold, “because his aunt’s dying and we need an extra man. But you’d better never send me anything other than an update on a case again.”

“Oh God, Robin… thank you… thank you… you are such a decent person…”

He’d stopped sobbing. His gushing offended her almost as much as the picture of his dick.

“I’m going.”

She stood in the dark, barely feeling the cold, her mobile hanging at her side. As the light in the neighbor’s kitchen went off, her par­ents’ back door opened. Rowntree came lolloping over the frozen lawn, delighted to find her outside.

“You all right, love?” Michael Ellacott asked his daughter.

“Fine,” said Robin, crouching to fuss Rowntree to hide her sudden rush of tears. “It’s all fine.”

PART FOUR

Great enemy… is wicked Time…

Edmund Spenser

The Faerie Queene

31

Deare knight, as deare, as euer knight was deare,

That all these sorrowes suffer for my sake,

High heuen behold the tedious toyle, ye for me take…

Edmund Spenser

The Faerie Queene

Strike’s gastric upset added days to his illness, and he spent New Year’s Eve in bed, reliant on takeaway pizzas but hardly able to touch them when they arrived. For the first time in his life he didn’t fancy chocolate, because the truffles he’d consumed after his out-of-date chicken had been the first things to reappear during his prolonged vomiting. The only enjoyable thing he did was to watch the DVD of Tom Waits’s No Visitors After Midnight, the taped concerts Robin had bought him for Christmas, which he finally unwrapped on New Year’s Day. His text thanking her elicited a short “you’re welcome.”

By the time he felt fit enough to travel down to Cornwall, clutching his belated Christmas gifts, Strike had lost over a stone, and this was the first thing an anxious Joan commented on when he finally appeared at her house in St. Mawes, full of apologies for his absence at Christmas.

If he’d waited one more day to come down to Joan and Ted’s, he’d have been unable to reach them, because no sooner had he arrived than a vicious weather front crashed over the south of Britain. Storms lashed the Cornish coast, train services were suspended, tons of sand washed off the beaches and flooding turned the roads of coastal towns into freezing canals. The Cornish peninsula was temporarily cut off from the rest of England, and while St. Mawes had not fared as badly as Mevagissey and Fowey along the coast, sandbags had appeared at the entrances of buildings on the seafront. Waves smashed against the harbor wall, khaki and gunmetal gray. The tourists had melted out of sight like the seals: locals in sodden oilskins greeted each other with nods as they made their way in and out of local shops. All the gaudy prettiness of summertime St. Mawes was wiped away and, like an actress when the stage-paint is removed, the town’s true self was revealed, a place of hard stone and stiff backbone.

Though pelted with rain and pummeled by gales, Ted and Joan’s house was, mercifully, set on high ground. Trapped there, Strike remembered Lucy telling him he was better suited to a crisis than to keeping a commitment going, and knew that there was truth in the accusation. He was well suited to emergencies, to holding his nerve, to quick thinking and fast reactions, but found the qualities demanded by Joan’s slow decline harder to summon.

Strike missed the absence of an overriding objective, in pursuit of which he could shelve his sadness; missed the imperative to dismiss pain and distress in the service of something greater, which had sustained him in the military. None of his old coping strategies were admissible in Joan’s kitchen, beside the flowered casserole dishes and her old oven gloves. Dark humor and stoicism would be considered unfeeling by the kindly neighbors who wanted him to share and show his pain. Craving diversionary action, Strike was instead expected to provide small talk and homely acts of consideration.

Joan was quietly delighted: hours and days alone with her nephew were compensation for the Christmas he’d missed. Resigned, Strike gave her what she wanted: as much companionship as possible, sitting with her and talking to her all day long. Chemotherapy had been discontinued, because Joan wasn’t strong enough for it: she wore a headscarf over the wispy hair she had left, and her husband and nephew watched anxiously as she picked at food, and held themselves constantly ready to assist her when she moved between rooms. Either of them could have carried her with ease, now.

As the days went by, Strike noticed another change in his aunt that surprised him. Just as her storm-ravaged birthplace had revealed a different aspect in adversity, so an unfamiliar Joan was emerging, a Joan who asked open-ended questions that were not designed to elicit confirmation of her own biases, or thinly veiled requests for comforting lies.

“Why haven’t you ever married, Cormoran?” she asked her nephew at midday on Saturday morning, when they sat together in the sitting room, Joan in the comfiest armchair, Strike on the sofa. The lamp beside her, which they’d turned on because of the overcast, rainy day, made her skin look as finely translucent as tissue paper.

Strike was so conditioned to tell Joan what she wanted to hear that he was at a loss for an answer. The honest response he’d given Dave Polworth seemed impossible here. She’d probably take it as her fault if he told her that he wasn’t the marrying kind; she must have done something wrong, failed to teach him that love was essential to happiness.

“Dunno,” he said, falling back on cliché. “Maybe I haven’t met the right woman.”

“If you’re waiting for perfection,” said the new Joan, “it doesn’t exist.”

“You don’t wish I’d married Charlotte, do you?” he asked her. He knew perfectly well that both Joan and Lucy considered Charlotte little short of a she-devil.