“I wish your mother—” she began, then, with a gasp, she buried her face in the handkerchief that she held ready in her hand.
More friends and relatives shuffled inside, beaming, kissing, shaking hands. Geoffrey kept holding up the line, bestowing bear hugs on everybody who did not actively resist.
“He came, then,” said Robin’s favorite cousin, Katie. She would have been a bridesmaid had she not been hugely pregnant. Today was her due date. Robin marveled that she could still walk. Her belly was watermelon-hard as she leaned in for a kiss.
“Who came?” asked Robin, as Katie sidestepped to hug Matthew.
“Your boss. Strike. Martin was just haranguing him down in the—”
“You’re over there, I think, Katie,” said Matthew, pointing her towards a table in the middle of the room. “You’ll want to get off your feet, must be difficult in the heat, I guess?”
Robin barely registered the passage of several more guests down the line. She responded to their good wishes at random, her eyes constantly drawn to the doorway through which they were all filing. Had Katie meant that Strike was here at the hotel, after all? Had he followed her from the church? Was he about to appear? Where had he been hiding? She had searched everywhere—on the terrace, in the hallway, in the bar. Hope surged only to fail again. Perhaps Martin, famous for his lack of tact, had driven him away? Then she reminded herself that Strike was not such a feeble creature as that and hope bubbled up once more, and while her inner self performed these peregrinations of expectation and dread, it was impossible to simulate the more conventional wedding day emotions whose absence, she knew, Matthew felt and resented.
“Martin!” Robin said joyfully, as her younger brother appeared, already three pints to the bad, accompanied by his mates.
“S’pose you already knew?” said Martin, taking it for granted that she must. He was holding his mobile in his hand. He had slept at a friend’s house the previous evening, so that his bedroom could be given to relatives from Down South.
“Knew what?”
“That he caught the Ripper last night.”
Martin held up the screen to show her the news story. She gasped at the sight of the Ripper’s identity. The knife wound that man had inflicted was throbbing on her forearm.
“Is he still here?” asked Robin, throwing pretense to the wind. “Strike? Did he say he was staying, Mart?”
“For Christ’s sake,” muttered Matthew.
“Sorry,” said Martin, registering Matthew’s irritation. “Holding up the queue.”
He slouched off. Robin turned to look at Matthew and saw, as though in thermal image, the guilt glowing through him.
“You knew,” she said, shaking hands absently with a great aunt who had leaned in, expecting to be kissed.
“Knew what?” he snapped.
“That Strike had caught—”
But her attention was now demanded by Matthew’s old university friend and workmate, Tom, and his fiancée, Sarah. She barely heard a word that Tom said, because she was constantly watching the door, where she hoped to see Strike.
“You knew,” Robin repeated, once Tom and Sarah had walked away. There was another hiatus. Geoffrey had met a cousin from Canada. “Didn’t you?”
“I heard the tail end of it on the news this morning,” muttered Matthew. His expression hardened as he looked over Robin’s head towards the doorway. “Well, here he is. You’ve got your wish.”
Robin turned. Strike had just ducked into the room, one eye gray and purple above his heavy stubble, one ear swollen and stitched. He raised a bandaged hand when their eyes met and attempted a rueful smile, which ended in a wince.
“Robin,” said Matthew. “Listen, I need—”
“In a minute,” she said, with a joyfulness that had been conspicuously absent all day.
“Before you talk to him, I need to tell—”
“Matt, please, can’t it wait?”
Nobody in the family wanted to detain Strike, whose injury meant that he could not shake hands. He held the bandaged one in front of him and shuffled sideways down the line. Geoffrey glared at him and even Robin’s mother, who had liked him on their only previous encounter, was unable to muster a smile as he greeted her by name. Every guest in the dining room seemed to be watching.
“You didn’t have to be so dramatic,” Robin said, smiling up into his swollen face when at last he was standing in front of her. He grinned back, painful though it was: the two-hundred-mile journey he had undertaken so recklessly had been worth it, after all, to see her smile at him like that. “Bursting into church. You could have just called.”
“Yeah, sorry about knocking over the flowers,” said Strike, including the sullen Matthew in his apology. “I did call, but—”
“I haven’t had my phone on this morning,” said Robin, aware that she was holding up the queue, but past caring. “Go round us,” she said gaily to Matthew’s boss, a tall redheaded woman.
“No, I called—two days ago, was it?” said Strike.
“What?” said Robin, while Matthew had a stilted conversation with Jemima.
“A couple of times,” said Strike. “I left a message.”
“I didn’t get any calls,” said Robin, “or a message.”
The chattering, chinking, tinkling sounds of a hundred guests and the gentle melody of the string quartet seemed suddenly muffled, as though a thick bubble of shock had pressed in upon her.
“When did—what did you—two days ago?”
Since arriving at her parents’ house she had been occupied nonstop with tedious wedding chores, yet she had still managed to check her phone frequently and surreptitiously, hoping that Strike had called or texted. Alone in bed at one that morning she had checked her entire call history in the vain hope that she would find a missed communication, but had found the history deleted. Having barely slept in the last couple of weeks, she had concluded that she had made an exhausted blunder, pressed the wrong button, erased it accidentally…
“I don’t want to stay,” Strike mumbled. “I just wanted to say I’m sorry, and ask you to come—”
“You’ve got to stay,” she said, reaching out and seizing his arm as though he might escape.
Her heart was thudding so fast that she felt breathless. She knew that she had lost color as the buzzing room seemed to wobble around her.
“Please stay,” she said, still holding tight to his arm, ignoring Matthew as he bristled beside her. “I need—I want to talk to you. Mum?” she called.
Linda stepped out of the receiving line. She seemed to have been waiting for the summons, and she didn’t look happy.
“Please could you add Cormoran to a table?” said Robin. “Maybe put him with Stephen and Jenny?”
Unsmiling, Linda led Strike away. There were a few last guests waiting to offer their congratulations. Robin could no longer muster smiles and small talk.
“Why didn’t I get Cormoran’s calls?” she asked Matthew, as an elderly man shuffled away towards the tables, neither welcomed nor greeted.
“I’ve been trying to tell you—”
“Why didn’t I get the calls, Matthew?”